


Spark

by Misaya, tashacho (froggy)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Breaking the Fourth Wall, College, College Student Eren Yeager, Comedy, Coming Out, Developing Relationship, Eventual Levi/Erwin Smith, Eventual Romance, Facebook, Humor, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Minor Jean Kirstein/Eren Yeager, RP Threads, Recreational Drug Use, Self-Discovery, Slow Build, Social Media, Thirsty Levi, Tinder, agonizing thirst and general social awkwardness for all parties involved, but they'll do the frickety frack at some point i swear, iPhones, no like i mean this is really slow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-02
Updated: 2016-04-18
Packaged: 2018-03-16 00:05:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 26
Words: 51,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3467060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Misaya/pseuds/Misaya, https://archiveofourown.org/users/froggy/pseuds/tashacho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It starts, like any good relationship worth its salt, on Tinder. </p><p>-------</p><p>Note: This is at heart an eruri story with slow buildup, though other relationships/characters are present and tagged.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tinder

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stillmadaboutpetra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillmadaboutpetra/gifts).



It had been nearly four months since Erwin had broken up with his girlfriend of nearly a year and a half. Looking back now, over his third or fourth or sixth beer of the evening (and, really, who was counting?) he thought that quite possibly he should have seen it coming. The college acceptances had come in, and they'd both been thrilled at the time to be going to the same university, had made plans about rushing co-ed service fraternities and about what dorms they would stay in and what classes and recitation sections they would have together. They'd been excited, but, as he mulled over the Natty Ice that was currently numbing the palm of his hand, they'd also been young and foolish. He tipped the contents of the can back into his mouth, grimacing against the piercing chill of the bubbles of carbonation at the back of his throat.

She'd found someone else in her organic chemistry lab, had found someone who 'understood' her better, she'd claimed to Erwin when he'd confronted her about the text he'd seen coming in on her mobile. "Let's face it," she'd told him, hands on her hips as she shooed him out of her apartment. "We're just not the same people we were in high school, anymore, Erwin."

His friends had taken him to his first frat party that night and poured drink after drink down his throat until he'd been laughing giddily up at the way the bright white stars punctured the velvet overcoat of the midnight sky above them. Until their faces blurred into one, and the music became a pounding bass line in his head, until somehow he'd managed to slot his key into the lock of his apartment door at around four-thirty AM, a girl whose face and whose name he couldn't remember clinging to his arm and giggling, tottering around in stilettos that seemed far too delicate to be walking around in.

He'd woken up the next morning, his mouth dry, his tongue swollen and fuzzy in his mouth, and a sharp pain located directly behind his eyes. She had still been asleep, her head pillowed on her arm, turned away from Erwin in the far-too-small extra-long twin bed, and her chocolate hair covered any features of her face that he might have been able to make out in the early afternoon sunlight that seemed to be shining too brightly into his bedroom. His roommate was nowhere to be seen, his bed uncrumpled and obviously unslept in, and Erwin had about three seconds to feel guilty before a rush of nausea had overwhelmed him, and, stumbling over her shoes, he'd staggered to the bathroom to empty the contents of his stomach into the toilet.

And while that had all been very well and good, Erwin felt horrible about it. When he really and truly felt like guilt-tripping himself, he would muse over their states of inebriation and the issues of consent and alcohol-influenced decisions. He hadn't been able to find any physical evidence of purported sexual activity, no stains on the sheets, no telltale ripped foil corner off a rubber wrapper, not even the stale smell of sweat. And the girl, when she'd left, had said nothing, nursing her hangover with a cup of black coffee that Erwin so graciously provided, handing it to her without meeting her gaze, ashamed of his own behaviour.

He'd never seen her again, and even if he had, he wasn't sure he'd remember.

That bothered him, how he seemed to be losing parts of his life without realising it, but, then again, he thought to himself as he swallowed another mouthful of beer, revelling in the cool slick and burn down his throat, it was university, and university was a time for getting drunk and finding oneself in acid trips and maybe doing a bit of learning here and there.

And, if one was a business major, it was almost practically unavoidable. His classmates were all sociable, all had invites to the best ragers on the row, all had perfectly manageable fake IDs that would get them past even the most critically scrutinizing bouncers at the most exclusive clubs downtown. It had been all Erwin could do to adjust to the new lifestyle, but adjust he had, and every weekend of his now consisted of heading out at eleven thirty with a group of his friends, identical in dark button-down dress shirts and black jeans, exuding youth and perhaps not the wisest choices of aftershave.

After that first time, he'd made it a point to try his hardest not to leave with someone, but promises easily made are easily broken, and there had been a few weekends in the past few months where he'd woken up to an unfamiliar face, sometimes to unfamiliar sheets and unfamiliar posters decorating the white stucco walls of an unfamiliar apartment. Those particular mornings/early afternoons, he'd carefully disentangled himself from their limbs and had just as quietly left their apartments, a ghost weaving silently through their lives, never to be seen again.

During the week, he kept making promises to himself regarding his behaviour on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, swearing to himself that he would never wake up like this again, losing names and losing time and losing track of where he was. That he would never again find receipts for drunchies (drunk munchies) tucked behind his driver's licence in his wallet. That he would never have to leave someone's apartment with his hair smelling like Berry Blast Shampoo because his skin and hair had collected a film of grease and the scent of smoke overnight, and it had been absolutely intolerable. But of course, these things had a way of sneaking up on him and getting out of hand, and Erwin Smith no longer seemed to have the willpower or the desire to try and stop their advances.

But tonight, he'd definitely made a promise to his friend that he wouldn't bring anybody home; he had a month's worth of gas money riding on it, and his friend's car didn't exactly have the best mileage on the highway.

Catching sight of his friends out of the corner of his eye, Erwin unsteadily wended his way through the throngs of people over to them, smiling and clapping them on the back and slurring that he would see them in class on Monday. They nodded at him, grinning blankly, smiles of sticky sweet acerbic white, and he could just make out a tab of something crystalline already dissolving on one girl's tongue.

"Stay, Erwin!" she commanded him in a voice that trailed upwards at the edges, and the low lights of the house's backyard cast her pretty and beautiful and ethereal in a way that Erwin was only about 25% sure was due to the amount of alcohol currently running through his system. "You've got to stay, this is my favourite song!"

He laughed as she grabbed his wrist, tugging him down for a kiss; the half-dissolved tab passed between them and sent sparks up and down his tongue as he insistently tried - and failed - to press it back into her mouth. When he opened his eyes, he found that hers were a deep blue, the color of the ocean, and they mesmerized him with their hue, framed by long lashes and a constellation of freckles scattered across her cheeks like Orion, and he thought that perhaps, just for tonight, a bit of alcohol-fueled love was just what he needed to top it off.

* * *

He woke up the next morning in her apartment, his head pounding with remnants of the bass from last night, and he winced as he opened his eyes to a shaft of sunlight that peeked in through the dusty Venetian blinds of her bedroom. She wasn't in bed; the trickling sound of water running in a shower came from the other room, and reminded Erwin of the insistent pressure in his bladder. He turned his head, closed his eyes again and nestled back into the pillow, wondering if it would be worth it to continue to feign sleep and alleviate the growing headache at the base of his neck, or if he should just make a break for it now.

The bright chirp of a cellphone made him open his eyes again, fumbling around her desk with his left hand for his phone. He winced at the brightness of the phone screen as he swiped to unlock it, rubbing his bleary eyes with his free hand and blinking furiously a few times to clear his vision.

"Congratulations! You have a new match!" the screen read, the same notification filling the screen all the way down.

Perplexed, he tapped on the notification; another white screen came up, headlined with the picture of a smiling girl and her dog: 'With Affection, from the Tinder Team,' the note on the photograph said.

He wrinkled his nose. Tinder was commonplace among his colleagues and acquaintances and among the university population as a whole, but he'd somehow managed to avoid the temptation of downloading it, had even on his darkest and loneliest nights at least convinced himself that he didn't need to sink to that level quite yet. But secretly Erwin knew he was a hypocrite, knew that he'd already become quite well-versed in hookup culture through trial and error and many sessions of practiced, several of those only remembered at the very tail end of the occurrence. And, the German portion of his blood whispered to him now, at least this was a much more efficient and straightforward way of going about looking for a potential partner for a night.

The water dripped to a stop, and the bathroom door opened, releasing a haze of steam and the smell of something fruity and flowery. She came back into the bedroom, dressed in a tank top and a pair of shorts that seemed made of just enough material to cover the essential parts. Plopping herself down on the bed next to him, all clear-eyed and awake, he thought it positively criminal that one should exude such freshness the morning after a party.

"You don't remember my name, do you?" she asked, but she didn't look particularly upset about it; in fact, her eyes, seemingly violet in the ray of sunlight that fell across her face, twinkled with amusement. "It's alright. We didn't do anything other than introduce you to Tinder. You saw a notification on my phone and you demanded that I download it for you." She giggled in remembrance, the sound light and bubbly. "We almost got a noise complaint because you were very insistent in the people you wanted me to swipe right on for you; you said your thumbs weren't working."

She really was rather beautiful, Erwin thought to himself as she looked down at the mobile he held in his hand, her long dark lashes casting stick-thin shadows over her cheekbones.

"He's cute," she said, suddenly, nodding her head towards the person whose face filled his screen at the present moment. "Looks all dark and mysterious, probably just a touch of goth."

Erwin looked down, following her gaze. Levi, 20, less than 1 mile away, the words at the bottom proclaimed. The young man in the picture stared out at the two of them, storm grey eyes taking in the blonde heads curved together as they looked down at him. His thin lips were drawn together, curving up into a slight semblance of a smile that was more visible in the crinkle at the outer corners of his eyes.

"Let's swipe right," the girl suggested. "He looks interesting."  
"Let's not," he muttered, already swiping his thumb left across the screen. Levi's picture disappeared, to be replaced by a redheaded girl blowing bubbles into the camera lens. "I'm not into guys."

The girl looked at him doubtfully, but he didn't catch the raise of her eyebrows or the questioning look in her eyes.

As if to prove something to her, he almost savagely swiped right on the redhead's picture, and the screen turned grey with the words, 'Congratulations! It's a match!' and, even as the app proclaimed their attractiveness to each other across the telephone wires, Erwin Smith made a mental note to himself that he would never, never ever talk with her. Or anyone else from the app, for that matter.

But, once again, promises easily made are promises easily broken, and university is a time for drinking and illegal substances and self-discovery.


	2. Simmering

It had happened again. Levi had found himself having a dream about one of his apartment-mates. He woke up, his hair matted to his forehead with sweat, eyes wide open, staring at the stucco ceiling, and at the black fuzzy blob of a spider that was slowly picking its way towards the air conditioning vent. His heart thudded in his chest roughly, loudly; he could hear his blood pulsing through his ears. He rolled over onto his side, wrapping his arms around himself, trying to take deep breaths and ignore the way his skin felt clammy and sweaty and sticky all at once. It was ridiculous, really, he told himself sternly as he stared out at the pre-dawn grey of the very early morning. He'd known Mike since high school, had known him through his awkward growth spurts and braces and even that time when he'd been convinced that one really lame hairstyle looked good on him. And, somehow, at seventeen and a senior in high school, Mike had managed to unwittingly become the primary subject of Levi's attentions, something that Levi himself had been furiously trying to ignore for the past three years.

And living with him certainly hadn't helped, not a single bit. Mike's snores were audible even from walls and two sets of closed doors away, and Levi punched his pillow in frustration. It was Saturday morning, and Levi the previous night had had every intention of sleeping in until at least ten; by the muddy grey light outside, it was looking like he'd missed his target goal by at least four hours. Mike would be asleep most likely until the early afternoon, if the drunken crashing he'd done around the apartment but a few hours ago had been any indication.

He sighed as he rolled over again, watching as the spider wriggled its way into the air conditioning vent. It was deathly quiet outside, and there was a chill in the air that had him burrowing further into his nest of blankets and curling into himself. He vaguely wondered if it would be snowing today. It would make a good day for snow, and as he blinked slowly up at his ceiling, his thoughts accompanied by Mike's vicious snoring from one of the other rooms, he thought drowsily about making a cup of chocolate and spending a nice day in bed with his chocolate and his Netflix subscription, which, over the past few years, had been the best soulmate Levi had ever had.

Fueled by the promise of a nice, relaxing day ahead, Levi swaddled himself in his blanket before rolling himself out of bed. He winced as the chilly hardwood floor came into contact with his bare feet, and quickly minced his way over to his dresser, tugging out a pair of fuzzy socks that he would never be caught dead wearing in public (striped blue and white, with little teddy bears dancing across the stripes, a gift from his undoubtedly well-meaning mother). He cracked open his bedroom door, shivering in the coldness of the apartment. The heater had furiously expressed its outrage at its overwork a few weeks ago, refusing to heat anything past 63 degrees, and though Levi had already sent in a work order, tired of waking up with a runny nose and/or a sore throat, the landlord had either forgotten or had decided that the state of their heater wasn't quite desperate enough yet. The cold didn't seem to bother Mike, nor the other two occupiers of the apartment, two freshmen, named Armin and Eren, that had moved in after the previous two leasers had left, one to graduate, the other to find his fortune in Russia.

Levi had no particular feelings about Armin, but was personally of the opinion that Eren had not yet had the misfortune of being tainted by the world as a whole. The boy - and yes, that was how Levi referred to Eren in his mind - though just a few years younger than him, was far too happy for that. It was almost disgusting, being around all that optimism and bright-eyedness, especially at seven in the morning when Levi would find Eren in the kitchen scrambling eggs cheerfully as though there was nothing else he would rather be doing. At that point in the morning, it was all Levi could do to drag himself out of bed and into the kitchen to make himself a coffee. However, this particular morning, when the green digital clock on the stove read out 6:43, Eren was nowhere to be seen. All the other bedroom doors were closed, except for Mike's, which was open about halfway. Against his better judgment, Levi couldn't help but peep in.

The view afforded by the opening wasn't much, but Levi could just make out the curved arch of a foot dangling off the side of the bed. As if aware of Levi's attention, the foot twitched, moved as the owner rolled slowly over in sleep, and Levi was about to grin when a second, smaller, foot also rolled into view, the toenails polished a bright neon blue that was visible even from this distance. A slight feeling of disappointment and nausea rolled over him, and he sighed as he forced his gaze away from the slice of Mike's bedroom he could see and made his way to the kitchen.

Obviously there was no way, he told himself furiously as he banged the saucepan down on the stove, not even attempting to be quiet anymore, sleeping flatmates be damned. Mike was tall and blonde and had a swimmer's body, and there was absolutely no way that he'd be interested in someone like Levi, not when he could have his choice of practically anybody at school. And obviously Mike was 1000% straight. That was just the way the world worked, Levi thought, melting chocolate chips into the simmering milk and stirring perhaps a bit too angrily. The world wasn't a place that was exactly fully accepting of...people like himself. Not yet, at least.

And what exactly would that be? Levi wondered as he violently ladled the steaming chocolate into a mug and all but tossed the saucepan into the sink to soak. He padded back to his room, cup of chocolate held firmly in his hand, blanket trailing on the ground like a robe as he pointedly avoided looking at Mike's open door. Sure, he'd freely admit to himself that he was - and there was that word, and all the stigmas attached to it - gay. He'd come to terms with himself quite a while ago. Coming to a civil agreement with his friends and family and the rest of society as a whole was a completely separate matter. Levi, being the pacifist that he was, was still firmly lodged within the deepest recesses of the proverbial closet, and had absolutely no intention of making his way out through the coats and hangers in the foreseeable future.

Closing his door, Levi looked out his blinds to the street below. At this hour on a Saturday morning, the street could have easily been a set for a film with a post-apocalyptic setting, especially now, with the sky all grey and overcast. Frost had started to edge its way across the glass, and Levi idly pressed the tip of his index finger to the bottom right corner of his window, wiping a small circle clear. In seconds, it had refrosted over.

Balancing his cup of chocolate carefully, Levi clambered back into bed, rearranging his blankets back around himself. He leaned over to his desk, pulling his laptop up into bed with him, and flicked it open, his free hand skimming across the keys and the trackpad. As the familiar red background and white logo popped up, he sipped at his chocolate and thought that perhaps what he needed was a good episode of Parks and Rec. Perhaps the one where Ben resigned in disgrace so that Leslie could keep her job. He was rather a big fan of that one.


	3. Burn

Though he'd vowed to himself he would promptly be deleting the application off his iPhone, Erwin Smith, as of a week and a half after installation, still had not actually held his thumb over the icon, waited until it started wobbling in fear, and proceeded to tap firmly and decisively on the little grey X at the corner of the white square. He kept meaning to do it, but he had to admit to himself that there was something fascinating about scrolling through all of the people at university, savored the thrill as he swiped right and the screen turned grey, proclaiming that he had a match.

And Erwin would be lying if he said he wasn't flattered that, as of exactly one week and a half after installation, he had close to a hundred matches.

He had yet to actually meet a single person off the app. They were all within a 2 mile radius of his apartment a few blocks away from the university, but Erwin prided himself on not being desperate enough to actually use the app for its intended purpose.

Admittedly, he'd almost slipped, once. A few nights ago, stumbling home from a fundrager at Kappa Alpha, he'd nearly drunk-messaged someone from the app, a lovely girl who looked like she had been raised on cream and honey, milky skin and golden hair and a constellation of sun-kissed freckles dancing across the bridge of her nose.

The morning after, his wallet sufficiently lighter, the evidence of his purchases spread haphazardly around his bed in a number of CVS bags. His phone was beeping from somewhere within the depths of one of the bags, and he hastily slipped out of bed, steadying himself with one hand against the bedpost as the world spun wildly around him. He lowered himself to the floor, carefully, so as not to aggravate the migraine he could already feel coming on strong behind his sinuses, and began rummaging through the multitude of paper sacks littering his floor. He pulled out a long string of receipt, squinting at the digital type that was already leaving smudges on his fingers. Why exactly in the world had drunk-Erwin decided it would be incredible to buy no less than seventeen packets of Bugles? And, speaking of said Bugles, on his wild rummage through the bags in a quest for his mobile, Erwin had yet to find a single packet.

He finally unearthed his phone beneath a pile of napkins that he was fairly sure came from the Mexican drive-thru down the street, though there was no evidence of Mexican food anywhere in any of the bags. Erwin blinked, rubbed his eyes with the back of one hand, and fervently hoped that that was indeed a smear of sour cream slicked across the screen of his phone while he scrubbed at it with a napkin.

Swiping his thumb across the bottom of the screen and tapping four digits in rapid succession, the soft green tinge of his home screen sent something roiling in his stomach, and he dropped the phone on the floor, lurching to the bathroom. His knuckles turned white against the porcelain bowl as the familiar, sour taste filled his mouth once again, and the Mexican food from last night made a sudden reappearance.

Sighing, Erwin flushed and stood up shakily, turning on the tap and splashing cold water on his face. He scrubbed at his cheeks, blindly squeezing a dab of toothpaste onto his toothbrush and stuffing it haphazardly into his mouth. The minty foam flecked across his chin and the mirror as he brushed vigorously, scrubbing away the acid taste in the back of his throat. He glared at his reflection, squinting in the bright burn of the bathroom's fluorescent lights. His blue eyes were bloodshot, limned red, his hair was flopping over his forehead, messy and unkempt.

"You, Erwin Smith, are insanely bad at keeping promises," he muttered to himself, turning away from his reflection and clicking off the bathroom light as he headed to the kitchen to brew a cup - or three - of black coffee.

* * *

He came back to his bedroom nursing his wounded thumb; the coffeemaker had decided to retaliate after its many Saturday mornings of abuse, and when he'd opened the lid to take out and discard the used filter, steam had burbled out of the top and burnt the side of his thumb quite badly. The digit in question had turned a bright red, and erwin sucked it absently, his coffee mug held firmly in his other hand.

He'd moved into a studio apartment after his freshman year, where living on campus and with a roommate was almost one hundred percent mandatory. His freshman roommate had been a seventeen-year-old named Nile, who had been fond of clove cigarettes and staying up until early in the morning typing things into a black browser, activities that Erwin had blatantly tried to avoid noticing so that he couldn't be called up as a witness in the case that something went wrong.

The last he'd heard, Nile had been sent to the Student Judicial Affairs Committee, something to do with the overthrow of a club website.

Rent aside, living in a studio flat was really quite nice, he mused to himself, thinking about the news articles with Nile's face he'd been seeing recently on the front page of the university newspaper. It was quiet, it was peaceful, it smelt faintly of oranges instead of the pungent sweet smoke that hung around Nile in a cloud wherever he went. He felt like he actually had space to think, that he actually had time to be himself and take off the cheerful facade that he carried pasted to his face around his B school colleagues. The walls didn't encroach on him and he didn't have to knock on the door of the dorm bathroom to brush his teeth in the mornings before class, waiting patiently until Nile stepped out, a towel hung neatly over his arm and no traces of water in the sink or the bathtub. It was downright odd. Occasionally terrifying.

Erwin sat down at his desk, placing his coffee cup next to his desk lamp and rubbing his eyes, yawning as he stretched out the cricks in his back. For once, he hadn't woken up with someone else taking up space in his bed, hadn't woken up to knees pressed into the small of his back, hadn't woken up to someone else's hair in his mouth as they lay sprawled across the better half of his pillows. But he did have one of the worst hangovers he'd had in quite a while, pinching behind his eye sockets, and he sipped at his coffee, pursing his mouth at the bitter taste and trying to ignore the insistent throbbing in his head.

His phone beeped again, somewhere on the floor beside him, and Erwin squinted at the sunlight filtering in through his blinds as he leaned over in his chair, draping himself over the armrests to reach his phone.

Seating himself upright again, phone now firmly in hand, Erwin sipped at his rapidly cooling coffee and examined his notifications, brightness turned down low so as not to irritate his eyes any further.

"3:24 A.M.: Mike Zacharias: Where'd u go? Juaavlle wnst2no."

Erwin was rather an expert at deciphering the occasional drunk text and snapchat, and concluded that Mike must have been asking where he was, because Isabel wanted to know. Isabel was a fiery redhead in erwin's Intro to Business Administration class, and though Erwin had tried to let her down as subtly and as gently as he knew how, she didn't seem to be accepting his unspoken pleas for mercy and disinterest. Despite the intoxicated nature of the message, Erwin winced, sensing the animosity even from hours away. Mike liked Isabel. Isabel liked Erwin. And Erwin liked no one, at the present moment. The matches on Tinder didn't count.

Speaking of Tinder, his other messages were from the app, a bright white and red against the grey 'Missed Notifications' screen of his phone.

"10:31 A.M.: Petra sent you a message."

Nobody had ever sent him a message before, and Erwin had been amused and confused by the whole thing. The app was marketed as a dating app, but erwin wasn't exactly naive; he was quite assured of what the point of Tinder actually was, but that didn't exactly make it clear, how people could get dozens and hundreds of matches without even talking to each other. It was baffling.

He swiped right across the notification, bringing up the app. The screen glowed white briefly before Petra's message came swimming into view.

"Hey"

And that was it. A single word. No punctuation or anything. Erwin sipped at his coffee and tapped on her picture, trying to remember when/where/why he'd decided she would be a good use of a right swipe.

Her first picture was of her alone, hugging her knees to her chest and smiling into the camera, the chaos and detritus of a bedroom well used and well lived in behind her. Her toffee-colored bangs were falling over her eyes, and a smattering of freckles danced across her cheeks, and in fact she looked not too different from the memory of the girl from KA, but erwin shook that thought away.

Her second picture was at her high school graduation, where she had been laughing into the camera, sandwiched between her two equally innocent and unassuming parents, her blue graduation cap slipping off her head at an angle. Erwin was beginning to think he vaguely remembered why he might have swiped right on her. She seemed real, she seemed happy in a way that was hard to capture in university, where people hid their feelings behind the screens of their mobiles. Erwin could appreciate that.

Her third picture gave him pause.

It was a photo that Erwin felt sure he had seen before, maybe on Facebook or the university newspaper or some other form of social media. She was leaning across a table towards a young man, her elbows planted firmly on the Formica and her face cupped in her palms as she listened intently to whatever he was saying. He had a finger placed on a diagram in the glossy pages of a textbook, open in front of him, and was clearly in the middle of explaining something. The photographer had captured them at a moment when his dark eyes were turned to the camera, seeing beyond the lens, and Erwin felt a twinge of deja vu and something else he couldn't quite put his finger on at the intensity in his gaze.

Levi, 20. The words danced around inside his head, mocking him. Less than 1 mile away.

He clicked off his phone without replying to Petra's certainly well-meaning message, and set it firmly on his desk, screen down.


	4. Hot

Levi had a Tinder account. Of course he did, like any self-respecting single university student did. Well, scratch that, like any desperate single university student did. Not that he'd openly admit it to anyone, and not that he'd let anyone close enough to his iPhone screen to see the familiar logo, a white background and a bright red flame splattered across it.

Levi had contemplated the idea of using Grindr, Tinder's flamboyantly gay cousin. But Levi's Grindr experience to date had not been the most pleasant one.

Coerced by his best friend, Petra Ral, Levi had drunkenly signed up for a Grindr account one night, a decision fueled by horniness and at least four Rum and Cokes. Hell, at some point, Levi recalled handing his phone over to Petra and slurring at her to 'do what she would, woman' before taking another pull from the handle of the nearest alcoholic beverage and slumping over the coffee table in her living room. He had fallen asleep to her mad giggles and drunken mutterings as she tapped a profile description into the app on his iPhone.

The next morning, he'd woken up to a pounding headache, a cottony taste in his mouth, and Petra snoring loudly on the floor beside him, her head digging into his thigh. His phone was lying face-down on the table, dangerously close to a sticky puddle of some cloudy liquid that Levi was personally offended by. He had edged his phone away from the puddle before flipping it over and tapping the home button.

His screen had been filled with requests and notifications.

Levi was not by any means the most sociable person in his class, nor the most attractive, nor the most outgoing or friendly or any other adjectives that might be used to describe a well-adjusted person. In fact, Levi had answered a questionnaire in the tenth grade about his potential job prospects, and had come back with the result that, based on his personality, a career as a beekeeper would be ideal.

He had looked at his Grindr profile, where Petra had picked out a picture that Levi positively detested. It was an Instagram photo that Petra had taken at a sleepover back in high school, without his permission, in a sepia filter that she had later protested made him look 'soulful' and 'did wonders for his eyebags.'

Levi had protested that they were designer eyebags, thank you very much, and deserved to be given the full benefit of #nofilter, but Petra had blatantly ignored him and had posted it on her Instagram anyway. Much to Levi's horror, the picture had received 128 likes.

The profile description Petra had written was actually quite error-free, a surprising feat considering how smashed they had been last night. Perhaps autocorrect was much more lenient than he'd previously thought; aside from a few silly typos, nothing was too glaringly out of context. Or, at least, that was what Levi had thought before he read the profile.

"Heyyyy my name's Levi. Looking for new friends and boyfriends. I like walks on the beach and good wine and Italian food, and I'm just looking for someone to loooooooove."

As he'd skimmed over the profile, his phone had buzzed in his hand and the notification at the top of the screen informed him that yet another person had messaged him through the app. He shook his head, frowning as nausea rose up in the pit of his stomach, and had just barely managed to crawl to Petra's bathroom and flipping up the toilet seat before choking back up all 4+ Rum and Cokes from last night.

Levi hadn't taken a look at Grindr since that morning, despite Petra's pleas and requests. He'd deactivated the profile, mortified and ashamed as he deleted the app and his information from the vast net of cyberspace.

Unfortunately, he hadn't been able to stop Petra from guilt-tripping him into creating a Tinder profile. Levi was not, by any means, a weak man, but he couldn't stand it when Petra gave him pouty puppy dog eyes. However, thankfully, Levi was there and sober to witness the creation of his Tinder profile, and was even graciously allowed to put in a few words edgewise amidst the flurry of Petra's frantic tapping.

* * *

Levi, 20.

About Levi  
Interested in making new friends and meeting new people. (This was a blatant lie, but Petra had used The Look on him, and he had been powerless.) I like Marvel superheroes and curling up in bed with tubs of ice cream, and drawing and writing and edamame. Captain America is the best fictional character to ever exist, and if you disagree, you can leave now. (Levi agreed wholeheartedly with this statement. There was just something about those muscles, that stature, that lovely blonde hair and blue eyes, that just really did it for him.)

* * *

In the spur of the moment, Petra had created a profile for herself as well, and while Levi's profile only sported the one profile picture of himself from Facebook, Petra's Tinder had no less than 3. One of which featured Levi himself. But he let that one pass, because even he had to admit that it was a good picture of him.

* * *

Petra and Levi. Levi and Petra. The two of them had been neighbors since the fifth grade, and had gone to school functions and family events together. They were inseparable, even after Petra figured out that Levi was 100% gay after she'd found some rather compromising links in his browser history.

They'd gone to the senior prom together, because Petra had just broken up with her boyfriend two days before the dance and she wasn't about to waste a $300 dress. They'd been in the journalism club together as president and vice president, and they'd applied to the University of Trost together, helping each other out with their school applications and doing mock interviews with each other.

In fact, everybody but Levi and Petra thought Levi and Petra were an item.

For their parts, Levi and Petra thought that the concept of them dating each other was utterly ridiculous.

Levi wasn't Petra's type at all, and Petra, while very nice and pretty and sincere, wasn't even in the right galaxy for Levi's considerations.

* * *

On cold, lonely nights at the start of the semester, Levi's guilty pleasure consisted of lying in bed with a tub of ice cream (Petra had been right about that one) and scrolling through his Tumblr feed and, occasionally, swiping through some profiles on Tinder.

He'd put the settings to 'Men Only,' and while he was willing to bet a vast majority of the profiles around the University of Trost belonged to 100% heterosexual guys, he had managed to find a few lookers, and, even more surprisingly, one or two matches.

And, of course, like any good Tinder matches, they never talked.

That night was such a night, and Levi was wrapped up in a blanket burrito and working his way through a pint of Phish Food when a certain profile caught his eye.

Erwin Smith, 20, less than a mile away.

Levi nearly dropped his spoon.

He would have been willing to bet his entire scholarship that the man was a stunt double for Chris Evans on the set of Captain America.

He didn't even look through the other pictures, just barely skimmed the description, before firmly and resolutely swiping 'right.'

Levi was not the type to freely discuss his feelings, but he would have been lying if he didn't say he was disappointed by the fact that no match notification appeared on his screen. He shook it off after a moment of indulgent self-pity, before sticking his spoon back into his mouth and going back to the Tumblr app to look at more inspirational posts.

But there was no question about it. His curiosity had been well and truly piqued, and when Petra called him up excitedly a few days later to tell him that she'd been matched up with a real hottie, "His name's Erwin!" it was all Levi could do to keep his phone steady against his ear and not burn the pasta he was making for dinner.


	5. Scald

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written to: Jealous - Nick Jonas
> 
> For those who don't know, Tapingo is an iPhone app that allows you to order food from participating on-campus food places (and some off-campus places, too), pay via credit card, and they'll send you a text message when your food/drinks are ready, and you can go pick it up without waiting in a queue.

Though he was a sophomore going into junior year at the University of Trost, a school reputable for its still-current usage of the lunar calendar as well as its women's volleyball team, Erwin Smith was still rather shocked to find that the first round of midterms was rapidly approaching. This was despite the fact that the university librarians posted signs everywhere that the libraries were going to be open 24 hours for midterm season; not even the increasingly long lines at the on-campus Starbucks and Coffee Bean tipped Erwin off to the fact that, in a scant three days, he had his Microeconomics midterm. This normally wouldn't have been a problem, had Erwin gotten into the habit of attending the 8 am class. Unfortunately, like any self-respecting college student, Erwin had developed a horrendous sleep schedule, going to sleep at 4 and waking up in the early hours of the afternoon, long after the economics class had already been dismissed. 

He wasn't quite sure what convinced him to download the ECON 204 syllabus. Perhaps it was the fact that he'd gone to the university bookstore earlier that evening for an ink cartridge for his printer, and had found the refrigerated section completely emptied of caffeinated beverages. A stray can of dented Red Bull had been all that remained of the once well-stocked shelves, and Erwin vaguely remembered the sharp taste of the vodka and Red Bull concoction he'd drank down at the ADPi party last weekend. Returning to his apartment and changing out the ink cartridge, staining the whorled pads of his fingers with black, he'd decided to run a trial to make sure the cartridge was installed properly. The document that had just happened to be top place in his printing queue had been the syllabus, and he normally would have tossed it into the recycling bin by his desk, but something inspired him to take a closer look at it before throwing it out. Perhaps it was a combination of the sharp scent of toner and the nagging sensation in the back of his mind, one augmented by the absence of Red Bull in the university bookstore. 

Erwin had initially thought that the date of the midterm couldn't possibly be correct. He'd thought that perhaps he'd downloaded the wrong syllabus, because surely the midterm was weeks from now. 

He'd rubbed his eyes frantically, squinting at the paper, bringing it closer and then holding it farther out, as though he could magically change the date. His attempts had been futile, and that was the current reason why Erwin was at the University of Trost's central library, his eyes dry and scratchy as he desperately tried to cram eight weeks of course material into seventy-two hours. 

His phone buzzed with countless texts from his friends, wondering where he'd gone, the screen lit up with a long list of Tinder notifications, but Erwin was far beyond the point of caring about what beautiful U of T girls in his area were messaging him. His tongue felt heavy in his mouth, and despite his current level of fatigue, he felt jittery and couldn't stop his left eyebrow from twitching, a frightening physical phenomenon that had the girl at the carrel in front of him hastily moving to the opposite end of the floor. His blood was probably at least 50% caffeine, and he'd started to stack the venti-sized cups from Starbucks to prevent them from cluttering his workspace. The side of his right hand was smeared with ink and the shiny grey of residual lead, and the numbers and graphs had started to blend together in front of his very eyes, the arcs of supply and demand merging into unreadable diagrams. 

Erwin was starting to consider the possibility of faking an injury or illness worthy of landing him in the hospital, and was just mentally debating the merits of whooping cough versus the bubonic plague, when someone plopped a heavy set of textbooks in the carrel directly across from him. The vibrations traveled through the wood and metal of the study tables, sending ripples across the top of erwin's newest iced coffee. The ice had all but melted away, after having rings of condensation all over Erwin's solutions manual. 

Erwin looked up, welcoming the distraction. 

The person unloading the contents of what felt like textbooks for thirty units worth of classes onto the adjoined table was that guy - Levi, 20, less than a mile away, his mind mocked him - and he pinched his thigh through the thick denim of his jeans. Surely this must be a joke, he thought frantically, surely it was some cosmic prank that the gods had designed specifically for him. Surely Levi couldn't have seen that Erwin had swiped left on his Tinder profile. Erwin dug his fingernails into his left palm, leaving scarlet swollen crescents. Levi sat down, his features disappearing behind the smooth wood of the carrel, until all that Erwin could make out of him was his soft shock of dark hair, and the soft scratching of his pencil across a pad of paper.  


He tried to focus back on his studies, noting with a bit of panic that only fifty-two hours remained until the present moment and the impending death of his GPA. He ran his hands through his hair again, distraught, barely able to concentrate on the words of the problems in front of him through his gritty eyes. Who cared about how many melons Craig needed to grow for optimal production on the nitrogen-rich plot of land he'd been allotted? After checking the solutions manual, and halfheartedly convincing himself that the answer and the steps detailed to reach it would be something he could duplicate on the exam, Erwin rewarded himself with a few YouTube videos and a squashed York Peppermint Patty that had been making its home in the bottom of the bottle holder of his backpack. 

* * *

It was 6:04 A.M., and though Levi was a sophomore going into junior at the University of Trost, an institution known for its mice infestations and its phenomenal hash browns, the two presumably unrelated, according to the custodial staff and faculty members who were still desperately trying to achieve tenure. He had come to the library to brush up on population genetics before his midterm the following week. Unlike Erwin, Levi had been very much aware of the dates of his exams, had in fact already long pencilled them into the little pocket planner stenciled with cute little giraffes, one that Petra had given him for his birthday. Unlike Erwin, Levi had actually had quite a restful night, and had come to the library only very recently in the hopes of getting some final studying in before going to join Petra, when she would finally wake up at around eleven, for some of the university's renowned potatoes. 

Like Erwin, Levi had had every intention of studying, and suddenly found himself unable to. He was hyperaware of the other student sitting right across from him, less than a foot of space and a thin wooden carrel separating them. Above the smooth rise of mahogany, Levi could just make out Erwin's blonde hair, which was standing on end, and a part of his forehead, which was currently wrinkled with dismay. 

Erwin Smith, 20, less than a mile away. The words danced through Levi's head, the Tinder profile embedding itself into the thin skin of Levi's eyelids. Surely the person sitting right across from him couldn't possibly be Erwin, Levi reassured himself in a futile attempt to return to his studies. Surely the University of Trost's student body boasted lots of tall, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, robust young men. Surely some, if not all, of them sported bushy brown eyebrows that seemed like they would defy even the sharpest of hedge scissors. 

He looked down at his genetics textbook. Vaguely wondered who cared about the exact number of base pairs Drosophila melanogaster had (139.5 million, for those curious). Scribbled down a number, checked the solutions manual to confirm his answer. 

At 6:32, and Levi may or may not have been taking anxious glances at his phone and wondering if it would be appropriate to pop his head back up for another look, perhaps under the pretense of going to the bathroom. Fortunately for him, the other student scraped his chair back and stood up, ignoring or perhaps just blatantly unaware of the laserlike gaze Levi pinned on him as he rose from his seat. 

* * *

At 6:20 AM, when Erwin couldn't bring himself to stomach the room-temperature coffee sitting by his left hand any longer, he put in an order at Tapingo for a venti cinnamon dolce latte with extra espresso shots. His phone vibrated ten minutes later, informing that his order was ready to be picked up. He stood, rubbing over his face with his hands and trying to ignore the way the room was pitching from side to side as he got up. This certainly couldn't be good for his health, Erwin thought to himself as he took a cursory glance around the floor, which had all but emptied out, the other students having flocked out about an hour ago to catch a few hours of sleep before their 10 AM exams that very same day. He looked forlornly at his books and papers, many lying in crumpled, ink-smeared balls around the table, and privately thought that if anyone was so inclined to steal them, they were more than welcome to, if for no other reason than to put Erwin out of his misery. 

He sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. No, no, that wouldn't do, he argued with himself. Those textbooks had been expensive, and he fully intended to sell them for at least 90% of their bookstore retail value to some unsuspecting freshman who didn't know any better. 

"Excuse me?" he asked, leaning a bit over the carrel. "Do you mind watching my books for me?" 

* * *

When Erwin leaned over the carrel to ask Levi if he would please stand guardian over his worldly belongings, Levi had currently been entering into a relationship of purely aesthetic adoration with the bits of collarbone that had peeked out of the top of Erwin's T-shirt. 

"Oh, sure," he replied absentmindedly, to the collarbones, fully resolved to take complete inaction if any enterprising textbook thieves were about and cavorting at this early hour of the morning. "I'll be here for a while." 

As Erwin walked away, staggering a bit, Levi couldn't help but wonder if the collarbones would take it too badly if he entered into a relationship - purely aesthetic, of course! - with Erwin's thighs. He looked damn good in those jeans he was wearing, and Levi had to stifle a mad giggle at the thought that he might possibly be wearing Levis. 

Oh, well, he shrugged to himself as he leaned over the carrel to take a look at Erwin's fruits of labor. More than a few students had broken out into hysterical fits of laughter during midterms week. 

* * *

Erwin came back, the few hasty sips he'd taken of his cinnamon dolce latte doing nothing to wake him up any more than the chilly March air had done in the two-minute walk from the library entrance to the Starbucks next door. His possessions were untouched, and Levi was sitting quietly, jotting down calculations in a neat, slanting script that Erwin was sure was more than legible into the chicken scratch he had to show for his own efforts at studiousness. He was just readying his mind to think once again about how weather conditions could affect cassava crops and thus the entire global economy when he tripped over the cord of his laptop charger. The latte flew from his hand. 

* * *

Levi was debating the merits of thighs versus the toned torso Erwin was sure to have beneath the MGMT T-shirt Erwin was wearing, when the other student tripped, spilling his freshly brewed latte everywhere and spattering brown all over Levi and his notes. 

"Jesus Christ," Levi hissed, jumping up and wringing his hands, blowing on the join of his right palm and thumb where a few drops of scaldingly hot liquid had landed. There was no saving his cream-colored sweater. 

"Oh God, sorry, sorry, I'm so sorry," Erwin gasped, tossing a few paper napkins at Levi, which were, true to form, quite ineffectual at cleaning up anything. "I'll pay for your dry cleaning, whatever you want, just give me a few days to get past this midterm." 

Levi wasn't that upset about it; he was rather busy ogling the way Erwin's T-shirt stretched across his chest whenever he stretched his arms over his head to run his hands through his hair, which now resembled a rather abused haystack. "ECON 204, huh?" he asked, finally tearing his eyes away to look into Erwin's bloodshot eyes. 

"Yeah, midterm's in" - Erwin checked his phone - "51.5 hours. And I'm still really lost." 

Against his better judgment, Levi piped up, "I can tutor you on it, if you want." The worshipful expression Erwin turned on him after that announcement had Levi all but swooning in rapture. Those blue eyes, bloodshot or not, were piercing and lovely, oceans that Levi definitely wouldn't mind being stranded in if given the opportunity. 

"I'd be forever in your debt," Erwin said, and promptly asked for Levi's phone number. 

* * *

"What happened to your sweater?" Petra asked as Levi plopped down next to her in the dining hall, his tray loaded down with hash browns. "Did you get splashed walking in the crosswalk again?" 

"Someone spilled their coffee on me in the library," Levi informed her, before stuffing a forkful of hash browns into his mouth. "And we've got a study date tonight." 

Petra, who had a mouthful of cereal, spat it out all over her tray. Levi eyed her in fond disgust before tossing a napkin over the offending mess. "You've got a date? With who?" This was truly unprecedented territory; Petra was convinced Levi's single status wasn't because of lack of admirers, but because of her best friend's prickly and generally introverted nature. 

"Oh, you know," Levi said airily, waving his fork in the air. "Tall, blonde, blue eyes." When Petra was still looking at him, dumbfounded, he rolled his eyes. "Erwin," he clarified. "I'm having a study date with Erwin." 

Petra's eyes widened as the realization dawned on her before her face softened into a grin. "Well, when you see him," she said, leaning over to take a spoonful of Levi's hash browns, "please kindly inform him that I'm still waiting for his response to my Tinder message." 


	6. Kindle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If your best friends don't eat everything in sight the instant they step into your apartment, are they really your best friend?

Levi was normally a generous right-swiper on Tinder. This blatant easygoing nature in selecting potential future partners probably stemmed from a lack of affection in his formative years, as well as an unnecessarily early exposure to chick lit and romcoms starring Matthew McConaughey. Petra had a different name for it. Thirsty. She liked to claim that Levi had been in a dry spell for longer than the United States had had a national deficit, and Levi couldn't correct her on that. His current dry spell had turned into a raging drought somewhere along the scale of California. 

Normally Levi was very generous with his right swipes. However, today as he flicked through the Tinder profiles, he found his index finger flicking to the left more often than not, and some of these fine boys even had decent profiles. 

What did Levi look for in a Tinder profile? 

Good pictures. Those were definitely a must. And the face had to be in the picture. Granted, Levi had been stricken by savage lust more than a few times upon being confronted with a rather nicely toned abdomen, only to be sorely disappointed when a later headshot turned out to be less than lovely. 

At least one self-picture. Levi was all for seeing that people were social and liked to hang out in big groups, but he felt particularly offended - and disappointed - when he swiped through three or four pictures only to find out that the person whose Tinder profile in question it was was, in fact, not the attractive person second from the left. He supposed, in retrospect, that he should have expected that. Those attractive people probably didn't need Tinder, and people placed in group photos second from the left 99.9% of the time were not the creators of said Tinder profile. 

No friends, or friends of friends. Levi despised that. Why did the app take it upon itself to try to set him up with people he might have had even the remotest connection to? It baffled him. Did it think he and this person were going to somehow connect over their mutual friend? As for friends, if they were really Levi's friends, they'd be jumping at the chance to bang him. Or be banged, as the case was. Fat chance, as his current contact list on his iPhone consisted of only his parents and Petra - oh, and now Erwin Smith! Levi would have to remember that for future reference, although if he was being well and truly honest with himself, he'd already memorized the ten digits forwards, backwards, and sideways.  

If Levi was being well and truly honest with himself, he was just using the app to break his dry spell. Him, and 99.9% of Tinder's users. It was laughable, really, how Tinder marketed itself as a dating app. Levi could count on two fingers how many people he actually knew had met their current significant other through Tinder. Farlan and Isabel had been the saddest couple he'd ever met, two individuals who had absolutely nothing in common and were only just barely tolerating the relationship in order to win a prize pool that had been set up by their friends. Their determination was astounding, but Levi very much preferred to stay with Tinder as a strictly platonic sexual application. 

His TA was droning on about the circular nature of bacterial genomes for the review session, and Levi yawned, flicking past his TA's Tinder profile with a rather determined swipe, counting down the hours until he could see Erwin again.

* * *

 

Erwin, meanwhile, had all but crawled back home, slotting the key into the lock, which had been dancing wildly, no doubt just as hopped up on caffeine and lack of sleep as Erwin was, before dumping his book bag unceremoniously in the entry to the studio. He dragged himself over to his bed - which was currently serving as his hamper, his closet, his desk, and his dining table - cleared a small patch of clothing away, and promptly passed out. 

"Congratulations! You have a new match!" His phone buzzed away, but Erwin was lost in a dead stupor and could not be bothered to check which cute girl less than a mile away was checking him out right now. 

* * *

 

It was four in the afternoon, and Petra had barely gotten out of her health and human diseases final when Levi promptly whisked her off to his apartment to rummage through his closet to find something suitable to wear for the fateful night rapidly approaching. 

"Relax, Levi," she grumbled as Levi all but shoved her through the door; she promptly went to the fridge and rummaged through the contents, nodding a quick acknowledging hello to Armin, who was scrambling eggs that Levi was sure had seen better days. "It's not like you're going to have sex." Armin shot him an indignant look. Levi was surprised; he hadn't expected the boy capable of such vehemence. It was a shock the eggs didn't curdle in the pan. So much for the sunshine boy. "He's probably nowhere near as thirsty as you. He's gorgeous." Armin was watching the exchange, wide-eyed now, until smoke started billowing from the stove and he hastily turned his attention back to his breakfast/lunch/snack, which was now quite beyond redemption. Levi waited until Armin had fled the premises with his blackened eggs - liberally dosed with salt and hot sauce in the hopes that it would make it taste better - before glaring at Petra. He'd thought they'd already established a firm policy of secrecy about his sexual orientation. 

Petra, for her part, was rather unperturbed. She'd had nearly an entire decade to become immune to Levi's petty glares and disdainful looks. She tugged out Levi's orange juice from his designated shelf in the refrigerator and poured herself a glass, sipping it as she eyed Levi over the rim. 

"Aren't you just tutoring him?" she asked, before nudging around Levi to the pantry, where she tugged out his (hidden) stash of Dove chocolates and unwrapped one. "'Smile,'" she read off the mint green wrapper. She eyed him suspiciously as she popped the chocolate into her mouth and licked offending streaks of melted candy off her fingers. "And what exactly are you hoping to get out of this encounter?" 

Marriage. Levi could see it now, matching white tuxes and sprays of orchid boutonnieres stuck in buttonholes, pink champagne and doves flying - and, more likely, shitting - everywhere. He shook his head at the thought. It was absurd. 

He supposed he would have to settle for physical relations. Very, very good physical relations. Erwin Smith, 20, less than a mile away, looked like someone who would be particularly gifted in that aspect. Unfortunately, Erwin Smith, 20, less than a mile away, also looked like the type of person who was bitingly heterosexual. 

"Friendship," he blurted out, more for something to say, a word thrown out in a desperate attempt to distract Petra from her rampage through his already rapidly-diminishing pastry. Oh, dear God, she'd gotten into the Nutella, and it was all Levi could do to hand her a spoon before she unscrewed the white lid and just stuck a finger inside. "Look, you're here to help me, not eat me out of house and home." 

"Wot are friends fo'," Petra mumbled, through a very sticky mouthful of Nutella. 

* * *

 

Erwin's alarm went off at 5 PM, and he woke up in a panic, his heart racing. Oh, dear God, he thought as he hopped into his pants, he couldn't be late for his midterm, he couldn't possibly - 

He glanced at his phone. 17:04, it read, and Erwin nearly collapsed in horror. His final had been at 10, and he'd missed the whole thing, and he'd have to drop out of class and drop out of school and go to live on the side of the road, scrounging for loose change in the gutter - 

He gripped his phone, knuckles white, holding it up with shaking hands to his face. 17:05, Monday, February 2nd. Oh. Oh, thank God. His final wasn't for another two days. 

Erwin's heartbeat slowed down to a reasonable 115bpm - caffeine was still running rampant through his system - and he frowned as he eyed the screen. Why had he woken up? 

Dark hair, dark eyes, coffee on cream - Oh. Yes. That was why. 

Levi, 20, less than a mile away, had offered to tutor him, and Erwin had grasped on to the offered assistance like Kate Winslet had tried to cling on to Leonardo DiCaprio in that one James Cameron movie. 

No. Erwin shook his head, wincing at the headache building in the base of his skull as he headed to his bathroom to scrub the fuzzy feeling out of his mouth. That wasn't a particularly good analogy. 

* * *

 

Levi was already waiting for him, a Coffee Bean paper cup of tea set neatly along his laptop and notebook, which was turned to a fresh page of college-ruled paper. He smiled up at Erwin, and Erwin was only mildly irritated to see how impeccable the other student looked - a charcoal gray polo that even looked as though it had been ironed, the collar creased neatly, dark wash jeans that Erwin was sure had been washed recently, because Levi looked like he was actually on top of things, making a flawless transition into adulthood. Or perhaps he just had a particularly motherly girlfriend. Perhaps both. 

* * *

 

Levi couldn't help but smile up at Erwin as Erwin set - well, more like threw - his book bag onto the library table. 

He was an utter mess. 

His hair looked like a particularly abused haystack, he had a delicious smattering of five o'clock stubble lining his jaw, and his T-shirt was untucked. 

Levi adored it, with an intensity that almost frightened him. 

Petra, who was not-so-secretly watching them from the opposite corner of the study room, sent Levi a text - "thirsty af" - which he promptly ignored by switching his phone to silent and shoving it deep into the recesses of his satchel. 

* * *

Two hours later, Levi was thankful he had revised his expectations from marriage to just physical relations. Erwin Smith, 20, currently less than 2 feet away, was hopeless. 

"No," Levi explained patiently, gently brushing Erwin's hand away and pulling the rather crumpled notebook back towards him. "Comparative advantage and absolute advantage aren't the same." 

Erwin groaned, a sound that had Levi's thoughts shooting off into a particularly dirty tangent. _No. He was better than this_ , he scolded himself, taking a sip of his soothing peppermint tea, which had gone cold ages ago. 

His phone buzzed. 

Petra Ral (just now)

"No ur not"

* * *

 

It wasn't until long after dark had already fallen - even Petra had packed up and left - that Levi deemed them anywhere even remotely close to achieving a successful grade on the exam. Erwin had just managed to grasp the concept of comparative advantages and elasticity when his stomach rumbled, rather loudly. He looked over the table, apologetic, and asked Levi if he wouldn't be opposed to getting some dinner.

Dinner? Well, certainly Levi wouldn't be opposed. 

It was starting to sound more and more like a date already, he thought to himself gleefully as he slipped his laptop back into his satchel. 

* * *

 

Erwin, like many of the other business majors at UTrost, had connections everywhere, and though they were both definitely not of legal drinking age yet, had managed to get them into one of the more upscale restaurants that the campus boasted. It was a nice place, a fancy place, like somewhere you might take your parents or show off to prospective students during recruitment season. 

They even had a wine list, and real candles on the tables.

Levi, who had never before stepped foot into this place, was suitably impressed. 

"You have no idea how much you've helped me," Erwin said, through a mouthful of chicken parmigiana. "You're a real life saver, Levi." 

Oh, dear God. Levi hadn't even drunk that much - he wasn't even a big wine person to begin with - but the way Erwin rolled his name off his tongue, even with a mouthful of breaded chicken - was sinful. He focused intensely on every aspect of the other sophomore sitting in front of him, trying to remember everything for his own personal mental snap story: the way the candlelight flickered over the planes of Erwin's cheekbones and cast deep, soulful shadows beneath his eyes that made him appear all brooding and thoughtful; his absolutely gorgeous, sculpted collarbones; even the way his knife was squeaking rather horrendously over the china. Levi would remember every last detail, and savor it on cold, lonely nights. 

"Do you think we could meet up tomorrow also?" Erwin wanted to know, driving Levi out of his own private reverie. "We could do breakfast, lunch, whatever works best for you." 

"Oh, definitely," Levi agreed. eager. Too eager. He mentally slapped himself, but how could he not? He and Erwin were practically engaged at this point. "I'd be more than happy to." 

Erwin picked up the bill, and Levi went home that night with a Styrofoam box of eggplant parmesan and a mind full of fantasy. He ignored Petra's increasingly frantic texts - and, a bit later, her loud knocking on his apartment door - as he curled up into bed with a smile, planning out the wedding ceremony already as the embers of early infatuation began to kindle. 

 


	7. Incinerate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written to Good Times - Tobu.

The University of Trost, much like many other fine and reputable universities both with and without mouse infestations, had a strict policy on food in the classrooms and in the libraries. The students of the University of Trost, once they had graduated from on-campus housing and their freshman fearfulness about violating academic policies, duly ignored these rules and the glaring highlighted flyers posted at the entrance to every classroom and every library warning them that eating inside these sacred halls was tantamount to an offense meriting capital punishment. After all, the tuition rates had hiked up this year again, and the students were almost unanimously of the opinion that, with these new imposed fees and expenses in mind, it was their God given right to eat wherever they damn well pleased. 

Perhaps the only students who did not agree with their fellow undergraduates' blatant disregard of university law were those unfortunate souls who worked at the circulation desks of the libraries. Though Levi was on good terms with several of them - they had many of the same classes together - it was still rather a hassle to bring even so much as a paper cup of tea in. You had to show them the cup, safely ensconced in its purple or beige cardboard holder (Coffee Bean or Starbucks, respectively), convince them beyond a shadow of reasonable doubt that you were not trying to smuggle alcohol - or, worse, something that could leave a stain on the carpets - into those finest and most reputable of campus institutions. 

Of course, most students just hid their illegal foodstuffs and colored beverages in their backpacks, but the people working the circulation desks had the noses of bloodhounds, and the instant one pulled out their sandwich of their thermos of dark roast coffee, they were all over you. They breathed down the back of your neck, and glared at you with rather intimidating passive aggression until you hurriedly packed up your study supplies and hurried outside to enjoy your food in peace. 

Erwin seemed to be immune to their underhanded ploys of disapproval, which only made him all the more attractive to Levi. He liked a man who could stand up for his principles. 

They were ensconced in the basement of the library, in one of the private glass-walled study rooms, which Levi, amidst all his giddy wedding planning, had remembered to reserve from 10-12 that morning. He had turned around to write a practice problem on one of the whiteboards against the wall - he took his time, writing out the numbers and figures clearly with the fat side of the marker because he adored the feeling of writing on the whiteboard, the pen gliding smoothly along the glossy surface with a slickness that awoke a strange sense of arousal in him - and had turned back around to find that Erwin had pulled out a portable George Foreman griddle, a Tupperware of creamy liquid that looked concerningly chunky, and a thermos of coffee, which Levi could smell the instant Erwin twisted off the cap and offered him a cupful. 

He could feel the glares of the workers at the circulation desk through the glass. But, Levi thought to himself, disapproval had never felt so sweet before, and he ogled the strong curve of Erwin's back beneath his blue polo as the other sophomore bent down and scrabbled below the table to plug in his griddle. 

"Would you like a pancake?" Erwin asked, as he popped open the Tupperware and poured a dollop into the griddle, which had already started to smoke rather alarmingly. "And," he leaned over to look at the problem Levi had written on the board, "China has the comparative advantage. Right?" 

He pinned Levi with that frighteningly delicious gaze, and Levi nodded dumbly, struck mute by Erwin's intense focus on him and the odd, half-charred, half-raw pancake Erwin had offered him only a moment ago. 

"Here." He swallowed, wincing as the pancake's burnt edges scraped along the lining of his esophagus on its way down as he handed Erwin the marker. "Why don't you go show your work for the answer - which was right - and I'll take over the pancakes." 

Erwin traded off gladly, his fingers brushing against Levi's palm as he took the marker from Levi's slack hand. Levi tried not to blush too badly, but he was sure that he had a rather crimson streak across his cheekbones. The venomous glares from the circulation desk followed him as he sat down in front of the griddle, but Levi was far too busy admiring the taut lines of Erwin's backside, his polo riding up just the slightest bit as he reached up to write on the board. He could just make out a slim black line riding up over the waistline of Erwin's jeans, and he found himself lost in the delightful conundrum of whether Erwin was a boxers or briefs type of guy. Boxer-briefs, perhaps? Levi was practically frothing at the mouth at the thought, and he didn't notice he'd all but incinerated the pancake he had been making until a rather unpleasant burning smell cut through his reverie. 

Erwin, fortunately, seemed not to have noticed, and Levi quickly hid the evidence in the trashcan by the door. 

"There's bacon, also, in my bag," Erwin said, turning to grin at him as he set the marker down. "Does this look right?" He stepped to the side to show Levi his scribbled set of numbers and jumble of calculations. It was mildly endearing, how Erwin had written out his 3 times table like a small child might, with similar handwriting to boot, and Levi couldn't help but smile fondly at him. 

He managed to pull himself together just enough to look over Erwin's work, deem it acceptable, and tell Erwin to do the next few problems in the sample midterm the professor had posted online. As Erwin turned back around obligingly, Levi rummaged through Erwin's backpack for the promised bacon - the pancake batter hadn't been mixed thoroughly at all, and after several futile attempts to break up the clumps of powdery Bisquik with an unbent paper clip, Levi had given up and had popped the top back on the Tupperware. 

His hand closed around something cold and plasticky that might have been the bacon, and he pulled it out to have a closer look. 

Much to his own embarrassment, horror, and suddenly savage arousal, Levi found that he'd pulled out a plastic baggy of condoms and packets of lube that had come from none other than the university health center, if the massive variety, color, and flavor were any indication. Taking a quick glance at Erwin to make sure he was still busy at the board - he was, and was currently muttering to himself in consternation, and...was he counting on his fingers? - Levi looked at the baggy in his hands before holding it closer to his face and squinting to read the stenciled fine print on a silver foil packet. 

"TROJAN MAGNUM: LARGE," the packet seemed to roar at him, and Levi all but swooned at the very thought.  

Sweet Maria Mother Teresa, he thought to himself as he carefully placed the baggy back into the deeper recesses of Erwin's bag. There was something sparking in the pit of his heart that felt dangerously like attraction. 

Levi resolved to try going to church more often. He clearly needed the salvation of a higher being. 


	8. Coals

 

The morning of Erwin's economics midterm appeared bright and early, and for what might very well have been the first, and last, time of his undergraduate career, he woke up well rested and raring to go. He ate a healthy breakfast - well, if barely reheated Chinese food counted as a healthy breakfast - made sure he had three working blue ballpoint pens in his backpack, and took a few more reassuring glances at the economics problems he and Levi had gone over during the past two days. The other student was starting to grow on him; he was a fantastic tutor with a snarky, soft-spoken sense of humor, and they turned out to have quite similar interests in prawn fishing and Super Smash Brothers Melee. 

Erwin decided that, as he popped his scientific calculator into his bag, that, quite definitely, Levi was someone he would want to be friends with. Even though he had caught the other student staring at him, on more than a few occasions, with a sort of hungry gaze that had inspired Erwin to bring his portable George Foreman to the library yesterday. It was the least he could do, and it really wouldn't be acceptable to have his tutor, and, possibly, soon to be friend, put himself in hospital from malnutrition. He already looked a bit on the scrawny side, and Erwin privately resolved to subtly encourage Levi to use his swipes at the dining hall. 

Speaking of Levi, Erwin pulled his phone out of his pocket to find a text from him. 

"Good luck! Tell me how it goes afterward. :>" (Levi, just now)

Erwin grinned before clicking off his phone and heading out the door of his studio. The economics professor was particularly strict on cell phones in his classroom, a policy that Erwin had observed during the first two weeks of the semester, in which the strict Russian man had all but reduced a senior to tears because she had had the audacity to send a SnapChat to her friend as class was wrapping up.

* * *

"Oh, my God, Levi," Petra all but roared at her best friend and, on this particular morning, her worst enemy. "Can you calm your tits until I get some coffee in me?" 

Ever since they'd entered the dining hall that fine Thursday morning, Levi had been clinging to her like a very large, very annoying, and probably not very tasty scallop. They were currently in line for the multipurpose cappuccino maker in the dining hall, but Petra had expressly forbidden Levi from getting anything more highly caffeinated than a hot chocolate, because he was already hopped up enough as it was. 

Levi had already showed her his cell phone no less than fourteen times, and it was getting to the point where Petra had half a mind to snatch it away and recalibrate the fingerprint sensor so that Levi couldn't unlock it again. 

"Good luck! Tell me how it goes afterward. :>" Levi had texted, but that wasn't what he'd wanted to show her the first, second, or the tenth time. Levi had greeted her that particular morning outside her apartment as she was still tugging on her jacket, all but shoving the iPhone in her face with a few frantic garbled noises that had Petra thinking he sounded like a particularly distressed turkey. 

Ah, yes, she'd thought as she squinted at the phone's screen, which was impeccably clean. Levi probably religiously wiped his iPhone with chamois cloths every other second, though she'd never caught him in the act. The horror of the read receipts. 

Underneath the text, it had said, in unforgiving 10pt. Arial, "Read 9:37 AM." 

But, alas. Though Erwin had read the text, he had still yet to reply. And it was already 10:15. 

Petra thought Levi was about to have some sort of conniption, and she nudged him forward in the cappuccino line. 

"You know, he _is_ _MY_ Tinder match, not yours," she said, sliding a porcelain mug beneath the drip and selecting the cappuccino option. The machine whirred thoughtfully for a few moments before dispensing the rich dark roast coffee that Petra regarded as practically heavenly. "I should be jealous." 

Levi was beside himself, and wrung his hands frantically. No, cross the conniption thing out. Petra thought Levi's anxiety levels were reaching Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man levels, and she fervently begged the cappuccino machine to hurry up so she could get Levi situated at a corner table where she could reduce the collateral damage. 

"Was the smiley face too much? The smiley face was too much, wasn't it?" Levi wanted to know, running his hands through his hair and making it stick up in the back like a particularly abused duck. Petra would have laughed, except she was all too aware of what a slippery slope they'd just embarked on. Levi ruffling his hair was tantamount to a public service announcement indicating that World War III had just started, and, unlike the first two world wars, America would not be a triple time back to back champion. 

It might or might not have been a nightmare that Petra had woken up screaming up from on more than one occasion. 

She herded Levi to a corner table, nearly spilling her cappuccino and Levi's hot chocolate in the process. "Sit. I will get you a plate of hashbrowns, and you will eat them," she said, quite sternly, and Levi, cowed into submission, nodded meekly. He was still vibrating with excitement and barely repressed stress, and Petra prayed to whatever higher beings there might have been that Levi would quickly find someone to fuck him into next Monday. Or maybe next month. 

She slid a plate of perfectly cooked potatoes in front of Levi four minutes later, during which Levi had flipped his phone from airplane mode and back again no less than fourteen times, in the hopes that perhaps Erwin's message just hadn't been delivered because Levi had somehow been out of range of cellular satellites. 

"Do you think he'll think I'm -" He was silenced by Petra jabbing an expertly aimed spoonful of hash browns into his open mouth. "Defpewate," he finished, spitting chunks of potato all over the table. Petra rolled her eyes and took a sip of her heavily sugared cappuccino. 

"You _are_ desperate, Levi," she informed him. "I literally haven't seen you so thirsty since the night before senior prom." 

Levi shuddered at the memory. 

"That was low," he snipped back at her. "You know I'm not proud of that." 

In short, Levi had gotten wasted on cheap vodka in the back of a stretch limo, had nearly gotten himself killed by trying to open the door of said stretch limo while they were going sixty on the highway, and, in a wild turn of events, had nearly lost his virginity to a well-meaning businessman slash bystander slash pervert who had happened to be checking into his hotel suite at the same time that Levi had finally managed to figure out how to work the revolving doors. 

Petra's efforts had been for naught. Levi had gone on to lose his virginity a scant few months later, during freshman orientation. 

"Yeah, well, I call it like I see it," she said now, swiping a forkful of Levi's hash browns. "Just calm down. He's probably taking his exam right now, which is why he hasn't texted you back yet."

Levi clicked his phone on to look at the time. 10:33. 

"Most exam periods are two hours if it's not science, you know that," Petra frantically amended, knowing perfectly well that Levi had no idea what the exam period lengths for non-STEM classes were. In truth, she had no idea either, but Levi didn't have to know that. "Just give the poor guy until lunch at least." 

Levi all but slumped over the table, defeated, quivering, and Petra just barely managed to rescue the hash browns from an untimely demise, squashed beneath Levi's shoulders. 

"Do you..." she ventured, hesitantly, when Levi showed no signs of surfacing. "Do you want to borrow Mr. Pickles?" 

Levi's head shot up at that, and he glared at her so venomously Petra would have melted into a puddle had she not been only halfway through her blessed cappuccino. "You disgust me," he hissed. "Like I get we're best friends and we've seen each other naked and whatever, but not even best friends share their, their, their vibrators. And who even names their vibrator? Mr. Pickles sounds like a name you'd give to a disobedient miniature Schnauzer." 

"Don't hurt Mr. Pickles's feelings," Petra said with a shrug and another sip of coffee. "You just seem a bit crotchety," with an emphasis on crotch and a raised eyebrow. 

Levi harrumphed, sounding even more crotchety than Petra had been implying. 

"Why do you even like this guy so much, anyway?" The instant the question was out of her mouth, Petra regretted it with a fervor that she hadn't felt since running for student council president back in high school. (She'd lost.) 

Levi began on a list of virtues that Erwin supposedly embodied - nice hair, nice clothes, probably a fantastic dick - and Petra sighed, rubbing her temples and hoping that, for her own sake, Erwin would text back sooner rather than later. She wasn't sure how much more of this she could take. 

"And he wears Dior cologne," Levi finished, triumphantly, nearly ten minutes of soliloquy embodying Erwin's graces later. Petra had slumped into a stupor, and was considering perhaps buying Levi his very own Mr. Pickles for his birthday when Levi's phone chimed. 

"Oh, my God." Levi grabbed it, clicking it open. "It's him!" he all but shrieked, driving away the students sitting at the tables around them. They threw backwards glances over their shoulders, clutching their hash browns protectively, but Petra cheerfully ignored their questioning glances. She was used to this sort of thing. 

"And? What's the verdict?" she asked, draining the rest of her cappuccino. 

She was rewarded with Levi's phone shoved in her face again. 

"Thanks! It went really well, I think. :)"(Erwin, just now)

Levi clung to her like a particularly annoying, particularly jubilant, particularly cheerful barnacle as she bussed her tray and coffee cup, and even went so far as to follow her all the way to her writing class, babbling about Erwin this and Erwin that and the implications of the smiley face in the return text until Petra finally nudged him out of the writing classroom and firmly told him that it was against university policy to sit in on lectures that they weren't enrolled in. 

Unfortunately, her hopes of a peaceful afternoon were foiled when she left the writing classroom to find Levi still outside, still waiting for her, hopping from foot to foot on the coals of his latest obsession slash potential conquest. 

 


	9. Scorch

Erwin, for his part, had absolutely no idea what sort of havoc he'd wreaked on Levi's fragile emotional state, and, inadvertently, Petra's stress levels. She had spent the better part of the day listening to Levi wax poetic about Erwin's return text and the innocuous smiley face that had accompanied it. She had gone home, her ears ringing with the buzz of Levi's incessant chatter and praises, and she had nearly run the batteries in Mr. Pickles down to the ground until she was finally relaxed enough to get up and make dinner. It was taco night, and though normally she invited Levi over for dinner - the boy absolutely adored tacos - Petra had had quite enough of hearing about Erwin for one day. 

"And did I tell you he carries large condoms? In his bag?" (Levi, just now). With one of those disgustingly happy emojis with hearts for eyes after it. 

Petra rolled her eyes in disgust, and firmly clicked off the phone. Luckily, she had turned her read receipts off quite a long time ago, thanks in part to a frantic now-ex-boyfriend-slash-hookup who automatically assumed she'd suffered a horrible demise every time she read a message from him and didn't respond within 2.5 minutes. 

In Petra's defense, how many times could you talk about your breakfast without it becoming redundant? 

They had broken up after a scant two weeks. Levi said that the guy in question, another biochemistry major by the rather unfortunate name of Erd Gin - sounded frighteningly like virgin - had been so cut up by the breakup that he hadn't come to the organic chemistry lectures for two weeks straight. Practically academic suicide. 

Unfortunately for Erd, much like last week's course material, Petra had already all but forgotten about him. The only thing that remained of him in her memory was that thing about the read receipts, and a faint, niggling sense of guilt that she was usually able to drown out with an episode or ten of Parks and Recreation and a pint of Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia. 

Speaking of Cherry Garcia. 

"Can I come over for taco night?" (Levi, just now). "I've got ice cream." 

Petra smiled rather fondly at her phone. Despite the fact that they'd known each other for what felt like centuries, and despite that Levi had a copy of the key to her apartment just in case she got locked out - which happened more often than she'd like to admit - she still found it rather endearing that he always asked her before coming over, texts and doorbell and all. Like a particularly scrawny, polite vampire of the non-sparkly variety. 

"Only if you don't talk about Erwin anymore," she replied. "There's only so much a girl can take." 

A .... bubble appeared. Disappeared. Reappeared again. Petra could almost hear Levi's frustration, could almost see his mouth opening and closing in guppy-like disbelief that anyone on this good planet could be opposed to hearing more about erwin's virtues. 

"fine" (Levi, just now). Grudging, reluctant, and Petra grinned, secure in her victory for at least the first three tacos. 

"Alright, come on by." 

The doorbell rang almost instantly, and Petra opened the door, surprised. Levi barged past her, a pint of Cherry Garcia melting in his hands. He shoveled it into the freezer, next to some mixed fruit and some dubious-looking fish that belonged to neither Petra nor her roommate, and had most likely been around since the apartments had been built forty years ago to provide more housing for the university's ever-increasing student population. 

"Have you been sitting outside this whole time?" Petra asked, astonished. It was already dark out. 

"Mike has a girl over at home," Levi explained, and, to his credit, this was the first time in recent memory that Petra could think of that Levi had mentioned Mike's name without flinching or swooning. This was yet another testament to Erwin's unspoken power and the current infatuation that was seizing Levi by the heart. Or by the balls. Petra was more inclined to go with the latter. "And I didn't want to disturb your alone time with Mr. Pickles." He said this with a sneer of distaste. 

Petra shrugged, opening a packet of ground meat. "Don't knock it until you've tried it," she said, sagely, dumping the ground beef into a frying pan and turning the fan over the stove on. She had used this same quote in several different contexts over the past decade or so that she'd known Levi. It had helped her immensely in introducing several new things into his sheltered life. Rum and Cokes (loved), marijuana (not a big fan, but not utterly opposed), and that one Photoshopped picture of Joseph Gordon Levitt in stockings and garter (adored! yes! 10/10!), and Petra had just been on the verge of convincing Levi to buy stockings off Amazon when he had, much to her and the seller's vast disappointment, suddenly come to his senses and clicked out of the Incognito Chrome browser window. 

"What's the point of having a gay best fried if said gay best friend doesn't even attempt to indulge my lonely fantasies?" she'd asked, and Levi had rolled his eyes dramatically and told her to get herself a Tinder account or something. Which she cheerfully had, which is where she met Erd, and had then quickly discovered that he had far more interest in discussing the political state of Saudi Arabia than he had in dressing up in a pair of stockings. 

Now, Erwin, on the other hand, from her far away glimpses of him and Levi's rhapsodic descriptions, now there was a guy who'd probably look fantastic in sheer silk. 

She made a mental note to beg Levi to ask his boyfriend, or hookup, or whatever, when it got to that point, if he wouldn't mind just trying them on for a few glorious SnapChats. Surely that wasn't too much to ask, was it? 

* * *

 

Eren and Armin, meanwhile, were sitting in their respective rooms of the apartment they shared with Mike and Levi. 

Armin, whose mother had sent her darling baby boy off to school with mounds of care packages enough to last him through a nuclear war, had earplugs. He also had Costco sized packages of chocolate chip cookies, bread, and weeks upon weeks' worth of bottled water and Red Bull. Faced with this gratuitous surplus, he had opened a small, unofficial, off the books business out of his apartment room, selling snacks at prices that would have brought the monolith of the campus bookstore to its knees. 

He was making quite good money off of it, and he hummed cheerfully to himself as he popped a pair of ear plugs into his ears and started to tally up the profits of this week, ignoring the way his glass of water was shaking and rippling as Mike's headboard pounded against the wall to the right of his desk. 

Eren, unfortunately, had no such luck. He had traded in his cheap set of noise-canceling headphones to Armin in exchange for a six pack of Monster Ultra Blue in preparation for his introductory physics midterm. He'd drunk half of it in one go, and he swore that he could literally taste the color on his tongue. But perhaps that was just a wild hallucination caused by the vague disturbing rabbiting palpitations of his heart. The energy drinks, however, could not drown out the rather excessive, rather loud noises coming from Mike's bedroom. 

The plaster on the ceiling rained down in dusty little specks on top of Eren's head with every creak of bedsprings and not-even-muffled groans. It sounded vaguely like a herd of elephants galloping gracefully through the African savannah. 

Now that the physics midterm was over (Eren had performed resoundingly averagely), he was holed up in his bedroom, the Monster still hopping rampant through his bloodstream, preventing his aching eyes from drifting closed. 

Mike's latest paramour shrieked. Eren stuffed his head under a pillow and prayed for the sweet release of death. 

* * *

 

The instant Erwin got back into his studio apartment, he toed off his shoes, tossed his backpack into the squashy armchair by the window, and whipped off his pants, ready to promptly forget everything he'd learned in the past four weeks of class. 

Ah, yes. The glorious studio apartment. The rent was a little spiked, but Erwin was willing to deal with that for the privacy it afforded him for certain, ahem, impolite activities. Perhaps involving a bottle of lotion and his right hand. 

But before that, he pulled out his phone, ignored the few new Tinder matches he'd gotten, and texted Levi. "Thanks for everything! I really appreciate it. :)" 

* * *

Levi received the text halfway through his second taco, and choked on a shred of lettuce. 

Petra thumped him heartily on the back, and instantly regretted it when Levi started babbling about Erwin again. 

 


	10. Cinder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Headcanon: Levi's loud when he masturbates/has sex. He tries to drown it out using equally loud opera, thinking he's being all subtle. Everyone knows. 
> 
> I'm still leaving this as "T" for the moment, because there's no like, actual, actual sex. I'll change the rating when we get to that point, I promise.

 

Levi, like many of his classmates, thought it particularly unfair that their exams had a separate block of time allotted to them. It took rather large chunks of time out of their weekly schedule,were usually set at hellishly early hours in the morning or hellishly late hours of the evening, and, what Levi found particularly aggravating in this case, prevented him from going to have an early breakfast with Erwin. 

He had been unable to stop himself from asking, two nights ago, if Erwin wouldn't be opposed to going to one of the dining halls to have breakfast together. It had been purely platonic, he'd convinced himself even as he sent the text. He had drafted the message no less than twenty-three times before finally sending it. 

_ "Heyyyy."  _

No. He instantly regretted it. That was two y's too many, and he'd surely fallen in Erwin's esteem. He was only glad he hadn't gone with his gut instinct and added the smiley face :> to the end of it. That would have looked truly desperate. This way, he only came off like a mildly inebriated sorority girl texting the Uber driver to ask where they were. 

Petra, sitting beside him on the couch, ruffled his hair and assured him he was adorable, albeit a clusterfuck of a person, and reached for the package of cookie dough Oreos on the table.

"Hey!" came the reply, chiming a beep four minutes later, during which Levi was caught in the wild throes of an existential crisis. Surely he'd have to drop out of school, change his name, flee the country probably, and he'd just gotten to the part where he hid under the backseat of a minivan en route across the border when Erwin's reply came back. 

"It's got an exclamation point!" he shrieked, nearly deafening Petra, who promptly stuffed an Oreo into his mouth. Her roommate, Mikasa, popped her head out of their shared bedroom, glared fervently at Levi, before clicking the door firmly closed and returning to her vigorous Facebook stalking of some other freshman in her introductory physics class. Mikasa had been a last-minute, random assignment who had fallen through the tremendous cracks in the university housing lottery system, and as such, Petra figured two semesters of peaceful ignorance and coexistence weren't so bad. They still never talked, sometimes, and Petra was more than happy to let the other girl go on her merry way, and could only fervently pray that the similarity in last names between her and Levi did not equate to a similarity in dehydration levels. 

The student sitting beside her on the squeaky leather couch was an utter mess, and Petra was quite sure she wouldn't be able to handle two. 

At least Levi hadn't gotten to the point where he was Facebook stalking. Petra had fallen asleep on several occasions to the soft white and blue glow of the webpage from Mikasa's laptop, watching vaguely as she scrolled past picture after picture of a boy with brown hair and turquoise eyes who rapidly de-aged with fevered punches of the right arrow key.

Just the other night she'd fallen asleep to Mikasa quickly going through what looked like the boy's high school prom album. 

Petra rather pitied the poor boy. He wouldn't know what hit him. 

She turned back to Levi, who had just finished swallowing the cookie. He promptly shoved his phone into her face, begging her to help him compose a legible reply, one that would make him seem cool and composed and not at all desperate. She snorted as she reached for the phone, tapped out a few keystrokes, and pressed send definitively before Levi had the chance to take it back.

"Do you want to get breakfast after my genetics midterm?" 

An instant later, the fateful words "Read 10:17 PM" popped up in unforgiving grey ten-point Arial below the blue speech bubble. A ... in grey appeared to the left side of the screen, then disappeared. Reappeared. 

Levi flung himself back into the couch cushions, springs squeaking madly. He couldn't look. It was hellish, the tenth circle of Hell, a particularly devious form of torture. It was an unusual phenomenon he'd dubbed as Schrodinger's text, where the message was sent and not sent at the same time, and Levi really, absolutely could not stand it. 

The phone vibrated in his hand, and he peeked out from between his fingers, bated breath. Horrified, sure that Erwin hated him already. 

"Sure!" it read. "What day/time?" 

He had perfect punctuation and capitalization in his text. Levi was hard, almost instantly, straining against the confines of his jeans. Petra shot him a look of fond disgust before reaching for another cookie and informing him through a spew of black crumbs that he desperately needed to get laid. 

Levi had barely been able to type out a coherent response. 

* * *

 

He had, in fact, been so infatuated and giddy with the success of his conquest that he'd stumbled home that night, marched straight past Mike's half-open door without so much as a glance of jealousy at the naked girl inside, and had stuck himself inside his room, turning on Madama Butterfly very loudly and pouring it through the speakers of his laptop. 

He tugged himself out of his pants, sighing with relief as his palm finally made contact with aching flesh, and pulled up Erwin's Facebook page. Summer 2009. Ah, yes. These would do wonderfully.

* * *

 

"Armin," Eren hissed, all but groveling on the floor. "Please. Earplugs. I'll do anything." 

Armin was not convinced. 

"It's the fourth time this week Levi's jacked off to opera. I'm going to go insane." 

Armin rolled his eyes, but he supposed he could scrounge up an ounce of pity. 

"I'll give you earplugs for your physics textbook after the semester's over." 

Eren recoiled in horror. "That textbook was worth $300," he gasped, sputtering. Armin was truly conniving. Madama Butterfly switched over to the Phantom of the Opera, but not before Eren caught the hint of an extremely loud groan. 

"God, fine," he hissed, and Armin smiled, victorious, handing over a packet of earplugs, which Eren hastily opened and stuffed into his ears, grateful that he wouldn't have to lie awake wondering if the barely muffled shrieks from the next room over belonged to Christine, Raoul, or Levi. 

* * *

 

Just as Levi had been about to come, his hand had tightened on his wireless mouse and he'd accidentally clicked on the Like button. 

He had gasped, horrified at the faux pas, even as he bucked into his hand and spurted silver into his palm. 

He undid the deed quickly, sobbing in mortification and the last vestiges of his thoroughly ruined orgasm, but alas. Erwin had probably already gotten the notification, probably found him entirely disgusting. 

He pried his eyes open, waiting with bated breath for the text that would spell out his impending doom, Erwin's message informing him that no, they would no longer be having breakfast together anymore, and why did Levi like a picture from Summer 2009 that was just really weird wasn't it? 

No text came, and Levi fell into a disturbed sleep, his dreams set to the rhythm of the banging of Mike's headboard against the wall in the next room.

* * *

 

Erwin got the notification. Levi liked your photo!

He thought it odd, especially because he and Levi weren't Facebook friends yet. But he had more pressing things on his mind, such as the fact that he had started out the night quite hard, and was currently quite flaccid as he watched the girl on his laptop screen. 

It was a bit worrisome, truthfully, because this was a video that had always worked for Erwin in the past, and he'd been more than ready to celebrate the slightly above average mark he'd received on his economics exam. 

Well then. He tucked himself back in his boxers and stretched, clicking out of the incognito browser and swiping away the notification on his phone with his clean hand. Perhaps it was just a glitch in the system. 

 


	11. Ember

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> barges in, slams erejean on table, flees

When Levi got the notification a few hours later, at 2 AM, that he had a friend request from Erwin Smith - 17 mutual friends! - he all but died. Nearly swooning himself into an early grave, Levi clicked the blue Accept button, and just barely managed to restrain himself from posting his entire life story on Erwin's wall. 

In fact, he managed to restrain himself from posting anything whatsoever on Erwin's wall. He did, of course, have a reputation of aloofness and casual disregard to maintain. Petra scoffed at his reasoning when he informed her of his trials and tribulations, and told him that Erwin had probably been bowled over by the force of Levi's thirst. 

"You've gotta give the poor guy a break," she declared through a mouthful of Levi's rapidly dwindling jar of Nutella. "You're all but kamikaze-ing him to death. Attack from four corners. The quietest wind blows the deadliest. Whatever. You're about as subtle as the Trojan Horse." 

Levi rolled his eyes, but secretly fretted about his subtlety (or, according to Petra, his violent lack thereof). 

He spent long nights on Facebook, mooning over the green dot next to Erwin's name whenever it was present, and lustfully moping around whenever Erwin's name sported the little mobile symbol next to it. Who was he meeting up with? What was he doing? More importantly, what was he wearing? It was a question that kept Levi up at nights, more often than he would like to admit, cuddling a large pillow that he'd liberally doused with pilfered Dior cologne and imagining it was Erwin. 

It was reassuring that Erwin's relationship status was a definitive "Single." Levi, in his fervent scrolling through Erwin's Wall, had just come upon the profile update in January where Erwin's relationship status changed from "In a relationship" to "Single." He took a pull of his Bailey's spiked hot chocolate and all but cheered. Erwin was on the open market, and though his profile indicated that he was interested in women, Levi was sure that could be amended. It was but a minor speed bump in the grand road of life. He privately thought that was quite a good metaphor, and told Petra so; she was currently knee deep in articles from online Chinese newspapers for her paper on politics in the Pacific Rim. 

She merely sighed, crinkled up an empty chip bag, and tossed it over her shoulder at him, before promptly returning to rocking back and forth in his swivel chair and meticulously going through her paper to resize all the periods and assorted punctuation marks with a larger font. 

"You've got to stop going through his entire life history, Levi," she admonished him, squinting tiredly at her laptop screen and wondering if her professor might accept something written in proportional font instead. Times New Roman just looked so bland, and seven-to-ten page (which, really, meant six full pages and one line on the seventh) requirement was sort of cutting into the light buzz she'd developed earlier. "Your thirst is showing." 

Levi blatantly ignored her and continued scrolling through Erwin's Facebook feed.  He had omitted the parts of Erwin's Wall that included his previous girlfriend (some strawberry blonde named Marie, whatever, forget her!), so certainly he could not be accused of rummaging through Erwin's entire life history. Heaven forbid. That would just be too desperate, and Levi was nothing if not a model of chastity. 

* * *

 

While Petra was out, Mikasa took the opportunity to host a party for herself and a large pillow she had spritzed with Axe as a preliminary replacement for Eren . She popped popcorn, had tea, and in general just had a lovely time.

He was apparently both interested in men and women, but Mikasa was not perturbed. He had accepted her friend request - they had 24 mutual friends! - so they were practically engaged by this point. She could hear wedding bells in their future. 

* * *

 

Eren had accepted Mikasa's friend request for the sole purpose of finding out more about Jean, who featured quite prominently in several of her group photos from high school. 

Jean was another freshman in his science GE class, and Eren had spent more than a few classes staring dreamily at the back of his head and admiring the blue streaks in his ash blond hair. He'd dropped his pencil once, and it had rolled in between Jean's seat and the linoleum, and he had thought it would have been lost forever had the other student not leaned down and picked it up, handing it back to him. Their fingers had brushed, so clearly they were practically engaged at this point. 

He could see it now. Jean Kirstein - he'd found that out through copious perusal of Mikasa's friend list - savior of pencils, destroyer of worlds. Something like that. 

* * *

 

Erwin, for his part, had added Levi on Facebook because he had 17 mutual friends, and because he figured that it would be nice to have another line of communication open for additional tutoring opportunities. Unlike Levi, he did not scroll through Levi's life history (at the time, Levi was salivating over Erwin's high school prom pictures); unlike Levi, he did not look to see what sort of people Levi was interested in; and, unlike Levi, he did not cheer or do anything of the sort upon glancing over the profile and finding that Levi was single. 

In fact, at the time of tapping the 'Send Request' button on his phone screen, Erwin's arm was going numb under the weight of an unconscious girl's head. She had come home with him after a KA fundrager that had rapidly turned into a "k, a cop's here, time to go" sort of deal, and Erwin, troubled by his newfound discovery regarding his supposed lack of virility, had not refused her. 

They had gotten to the door of his studio, with him fumbling for his keys and with her groping at the crotch of his jeans, and had made it in without any further issue. There had been some making out against the door, some lazy kissing on the couch, and right as Erwin had been about to ask her if she wanted to go any further, she'd conked out right on his arm. And that was the end of that particular story. 

He had fumbled with his phone in his pocket, swiped away some Tinder notifications, watched through the campus Snap story for a little bit, and then had gotten around to adding Levi on Facebook. His profile picture was of him and some nice, familiar-looking girl with honey hair and amber eyes. He squinted at her for a moment, tapping on the profile picture to enlarge it. 

" - with Petra Ral," it read under the photograph in white text, with 42 likes and 7 comments. (Unlike Levi, Erwin had very little interest in perusing through the minutiae of Levi's social media, and consequently did not tap to see what said comments were. Levi had already memorized the larger part of Erwin's 2013 trip to Cancun. Pictures, poses, tags, comments, likes. Nothing was sacred.) 

Ah, Petra. No wonder she looked so familiar. Erwin had been matched with her on Tinder some time ago, and had just never gotten around to replying to her friendly, completely non-provocative message. Looking back on it now, and trying not to sneeze as the girl shifted a bit and presented him with a faceful of curly brown hair, he felt a bit bad about not replying. 

But clearly she and Levi were a thing. She had her arms wrapped around him, her head on his shoulder, with a pretty seemingly starstruck smile on her face, and Levi had been caught in the middle of a laugh. Clearly, they were together, and Erwin vaguely wondered if it was proper etiquette to inform Levi that his girlfriend had a Tinder. 

Wait. That didn't make sense. Levi had a Tinder as well. And his profile had said he was single. Erwin felt the start of a swell of nausea building up inside his stomach, and he clicked his phone off, gently nudging the girl aside and deeming the entire night a failure as he tottered to the bathroom, privately resolving to never again mix his liquors. 

There was also the question of why/how Levi had accepted his friend request so quickly. It was a bit unnerving, especially since it was 2 something in the morning, but perhaps the other student slept odd hours. Pulling the 3-9 shift. Something like that. It was a sleep schedule that Erwin, too, was familiar with, and he shrugged off the rest of his worries as he dropped himself to his knees in front of the toilet. 


	12. Flint & Steel

The morning of his genetics midterm came, dawning brighter and earlier than it had any right to. Levi woke up two hours before his final, like a well-adjusted student making a flawless transition into adult. 

Levi was, however, anything but. He was, after all, a strapping twenty year old male in the prime of his life, supposedly at the peak of his sexual activity (though it felt horrifyingly like an abyss), and, to top it with a cherry, he thought he might be treading dangerously close to a crush. 

If you had asked Petra, she would have said with definitive certainty that one should probably generously medicate Levi with copious amounts of sex and alcohol, and then observe him again. Sure, she supposed it was possible that Levi had a thing for Erwin, but a thing and a thirst weren't always one and the same. She was also quite busy applying for summer study abroad programs - her eye was on Oxford in the United Kingdom, and, consequently, Petra was unaware of just how extreme Levi's dehydration had gotten. 

Levi woke up bright and chipper, practically vibrating with excitement. Now, where most students would have used these two extra hours in which to desperately cram four weeks of material into their already exhausted coconuts, Levi had no such desires. He rationalized that, if he didn't know the material by now, he would never know it, and so he spent these two hours fluffing himself up for his not-date withErwin. 

He took a long shower, yodeling to himself as he popped the cap off a leftover bottle of Berry Blast Shampoo, probably a relic left behind by one of Mike's paramours. Normally, this would have bothered him, but Levi was in a particularly cheery mood that morning and the Berry Blast Shampoo was quite good for volume enhancement. In fact, Levi was in such a good mood that he was able to tune out Eren's banging on the bathroom door and begging him to please hurry.

* * *

 

Eren banged his head against the white door of the bathroom he shared with Levi. He had to get to class early to make sure he got a good seat behind or - dare he hope? - beside Jean in Health and Human Disease, and Levi was making that utterly impossible at the present moment. 

His mother had warned him about things like this, about bathroom-monopolizing, cleaning-obsessed roommates, and with all the cocksurety of youth, he'd chosen not to listen. "Mom!" he'd protested, when she'd tried to tuck more packets of mints into his portable chest of drawers. "I'm sure I won't have any problems with my roommates." What a fool he'd been. But, in his defense, nothing could have prepared him for Levi. 

He checked his phone - the background might or might not have been a surreptitious snapshot of the back of Jean's head. It was 8:17, and if Levi didn't get out of the bathroom soon, Eren might have to resort to drastic measures. 

Mike's and Armin's bathroom was strictly off limits. Armin had made this more than clear, and Eren valued his life, along with the occasional bag of chocolate chip cookies he managed to pilfer from Armin's stash in the pantry when the other freshman was out at class. 

Ten minutes later, when Levi's incessant singing still hadn't stopped, Eren decided that not even the fear of God (and of the opera) that Levi inspired in him was enough to hold him back. 

"I'll buy you a jumbo tub of Clorox Wipes!" he hollered through the door. "Lemon scented!" Levi's singing abruptly stopped. Considering the offer. 

Two minutes later, Eren was all but bowled over as Levi flung the door open, a blue terrycloth towel wrapped around his waist. 

"I'll hold you to that," he informed Eren, before scurrying quickly to his bedroom and clicking the door firmly closed. Savoring his small victories, Eren dashed into the shower with a grin on his face. Perhaps he'd get to sit next to Jean today! Unfortunately, upon upending his tube of shampoo over his outstretched palm, Eren found that there was no more Berry Blast Shampoo to be had. 

* * *

 

An hour and a half passed by disturbingly quickly, during which Levi had managed to upend the contents of his dressers all over his bed. Coats and sweaters and long-sleeved polos tangled their sleeves together on the comforter, and yet he was nowhere near closer to being dressed than he had been popping out of the shower. 

Argyle? No. Too frumpy. Polyester? No. Too cheap. God! He had absolutely nothing to wear. His alarm rang, alerting him to the fact that his genetics midterm was in half an hour, and if he didn't get dressed right this instant he'd be late to the exam and would have to grovel for one of the TAs to let him into the auditorium. And Levi Ackerman would not grovel. 

He threw on a pair of dark wash jeans and a polo/sweater vest combo, spritzing himself with cologne and slinging his messenger bag over his shoulder before darting out the door. 

* * *

 

Jean was busy scrolling through his potential Tinder matches (2), and consequently was not bothered by the commotion of the door to the lecture hall banging open. 

He was, however, significantly bothered by the fact that whoever had barged in ten minutes into lecture was currently jostling at the air next to his elbow as they settled themselves into the seat right next to him. There were perfectly empty rows in front and in back of him, and if the person just had to sit in this row, they should have at least observed the every-other-seat policy. 

They also smelled frighteningly of Axe. 

Jean glared from the corner of his eye at the new arrival, who was currently rummaging through his bag for a pencil. His irritation faded almost instantly, and he clicked his phone off. 

* * *

 

Levi stared blankly at the chalkboard, thinking utterly nasty, depraved thoughts about Erwin Smith. He'd gotten stuck on a question about heterochromatin, but right as he'd felt the answer on the tip of his tongue, he'd started wondering about what he'd say to Erwin at breakfast. He tapped his ballpoint pen against the page fruitlessly, and, in the end, just scribbled down a few random words in very messy handwriting - "Biology! Drosophila melanogaster! Chromatin!" - and prayed for partial credit. Perhaps the graders would be generous, and just assume that his intentionally horrific scrawl meant something profound.

Of course, the instant he stepped foot out of the auditorium, he remembered the correct answer. He nearly slapped himself for it, but then reasoned that it wouldn't do to have a red mark on his face. He had to look his best for his future conquest in the sobering light of day. 

* * *

 

Erwin was already waiting patiently at a table on the far side of the dining hall when Levi entered, and he clicked off his phone and waved for the other student to join him. 

"How was your midterm?" he asked, smiling across the table as Levi flung his messenger bag unceremoniously into a chair. "Genetics, was it?"

"It went okay," Levi replied nonchalantly, trying to ignore the way his heart was thudding frantic in his chest. Erwin had remembered! He tried not to dissolve into a puddle. "How was yours?" Oh, God. Faux pas. He almost slapped himself again. He'd already asked how Erwin's midterm had gone, had already received an affirmative. Now he'd definitely have to drop out of school, flee the country. 

Erwin looked puzzled for a moment, before he smiled. "It was okay, also," he replied, and Levi wanted to erect a monument for Erwin Smith, best smoother-over of awkward situations 2015. "So, um, shall we?" 

Levi was too jittery to eat much, and settled back in his seat with a plate of eggs and potatoes and a cup of coffee. Had Petra been there, she would have slapped the coffee out of his hands and told him to go drink something nutritious, like the fresh-squeezed juice in the Minute Maid machine that was clearly made from frozen concentrate. But alas, Petra was not there that fortuitous day, and could not save Levi from himself. 

Levi was all but shaking apart at the seams as he hungrily watched Erwin devour two entire omelettes, a stack of French toast, and three rashers of bacon. He was certainly making the most of the mandatory campus meal plan, and Levi salivated at the thought of how thick and juicy Erwin's thighs must have been. 

He was so preoccupied with the thought of Erwin's thighs, and how they might feel against his own, so much so that he didn't notice that Erwin was talking to him. 

"plans for the weekend - Levi?" 

He jolted out of his stupor, sloshing coffee across the table, and Erwin leaned over to deposit napkins all over the table. Their fingers brushed, and Levi was sure he'd purchased a one way ticket to Hell for even daring to think about what those fingers could do to him. 

"Sorry, what was that?" he asked, all but frothing at the mouth as Erwin rolled up his long sleeved shirt to the elbows. Levi was weak for the forearm thing. He had spent many a long, cold winter's night studiously making a collage of his favorite forearms, which he'd saved into a series of folders titled "College." He thought that perhaps he'd have to add Erwin's in there at some point. 

"I was asking if you had any plans for the weekend," Erwin repeated, smiling. He had ketchup at the corner of his mouth, and Levi was struck with an intense desire to lean over the coffee-smattered table and lick it off. Had Petra been there, she probably would have sprayed him with a spray bottle of cool water as a reminder to him to cover his sin. 

"Oh, I," Levi spluttered, choking on air. "No, not really," he finally gasped out. "Why?" 

"Oh, I was thinking maybe you'd like to come to Korean barbecue with me and a few friends," Erwin replied, clearly unaware of the effect he was having on Levi. (Levi was utterly grateful that he'd worn the tight jeans today. He'd popped a boner like no other.) "To celebrate the end of midterms. And Petra can come too," he hastened to add. "You've been a real help." 

Levi babbled an incoherent affirmative. Yes, of course he'd be delighted to go, had nothing better to do, really should get out more often. Erwin smiled and informed him he'd pick him up at 1:30, and could he put his address in his phone?

Levi barely managed to refrain from adding a little heart next to his name. (And so he settled for a smiley face instead. Yeah, that's the ticket.) 

Levi :> 


	13. Sizzle

 

Erwin pulled up outside Levi's apartment that Saturday afternoon, blowing in his cupped hands and rubbing them together to keep them warm in the February chill. He'd gotten up only fifteen minutes ago, after a few frantic texts from Mike, who'd already made his way to the restaurant. His hookup from the previous night's TriDelt Anchor Splash fundrager had apparently lived in a fancy apartment only a few blocks away from Castle II, and so he'd collected his various garments and bumbled out of the apartment at the earliest possible opportunity. 

Erwin, who'd attended the same fundrager, had woken up by himself in his studio apartment with a massive headache that he hoped to alleviate with the generous application of beef brisket and cheap Korean soju. He'd have been lying if he were to say he wasn't just the slightest bit disappointed, and perhaps also the slightest bit relieved. His parents were coming to visit in a few weeks, and he had been scouring the studio for anything that might incriminate him. He'd already found two lacy bras, a 36C and a 32B, and had been scrubbing around the baseboards near his bed, praying that their matching counterparts had either been taken by their owners or had vanished into the ether. It was odd, he thought to himself as he picked up the incriminating undergarments by their flimsy straps. He could have sworn the last pair of breasts he'd seen had been his ex-girlfriend Marie's, at a DKA highlighter party, whipping her white lacy bra off at strip poker in the living room, hazy with a fog of cigarette smoke that had left his throat tickling for days. 

He frowned, trying to remember what he'd thought about that particular night. Nothing came back to him, other than the tactile sensations of the freshly opened deck of cards beneath his fingers and the way the jack in his hand seemed to be laughing at him. 

It really would not do for his well-meaning mother to bring the family Swiffer to mop down the apartment, only to pull it out from under his bed with a thong clinging to the cotton dust-collecting pad. She would be horrified, swooning straight into an early grave, and his father? Well, his father would probably give him a high five and slip him a sleeve of extra condoms. 

Speaking of condoms. That reminded him. He'd have to find somewhere else to stash the little grab baggy of condoms and lube that he'd made at the health center. They were currently sitting in a drawer of his desk, but that was the first place any knowledgeable busybody - or his mother - would think to look, for proof of illicit activities. He'd carried it around at the bottom of his backpack under his notebooks and graphing calculator for a week or so, until he began to worry about what the weight of the assorted school materials might do to the packets of lube, overfilled and squashy to begin with. 

But no. That was a problem for a different time. Right now he was listening to the new Muse album, mouthing the words and drumming on the steering wheel with the heels of his hands. He'd just gotten to a particularly good air guitar part, getting rather into it, head banging and all, blonde hair flopping over his forehead, when he heard a tap at his window. 

Was he blushing? Most certainly not. He'd been caught in more compromising situations than this. He leaned over to unlock the door for Levi, and the other sophomore climbed in, plopping himself into the passenger seat and holding his hands in front of the heating vents for warmth. 

"Petra not coming?" he asked, quirking an eyebrow at Levi, who just shook his head. 

"She's busy," he chirped, looking suspiciously cheerful about it. erwin wondered if Levi and Petra were going through a rough patch, and he was glad for the time away from her. Perhaps they were one of those more progressive couples, in an open relationship or something like that where they didn't have to be attached at the hip. Erwin, despite the fact that he'd taken some gender studies slash relationship health seminar for a general education requirement in his freshman year, still had little to no clue about how those were supposed to work. Fortunately, he'd taken it pass/fail. "Is this Muse?"

Erwin was taken aback. Most of his business school classmates' musical tastes geared toward the likes of Avicii and Tiesto, with maybe the occasional indie rock slipping in there. Muse? they'd ask him whenever they'd slip into his car, drunken giggling and alcohol fumes soaking through his seats. Muh muh muh muh madness?

By virtue of having a car that could seat more than two people, and his firm resolve to not get drunk quite as much this semester,Erwin had somehow become the designated driver for the entire business school class of 2018, courtesy of Mike, who'd probably distributed his number all over the university by now. 

"It is," he replied, returning Levi's warm smile with a flabbergasted one of his own. "Do you like them?" 

* * *

Levi couldn't stop staring at the way Erwin's lips pursed as he said the word "Muse," and wondering what it might be like to kiss him. In truth, Levi only knew one Muse song, the one that went muh muh muh muh madness, but he recognized the pitch of the voice on the CD that was playing at quite a respectably soft volume in Erwin's Toyota. 

"Yes," he gabbled at Erwin. "I love them." 

Erwin beamed at him, and Levi all but melted into a puddle in the passenger seat. No, he reminded himself with a firm pinch to his thigh as Erwin pulled away from the curb with only the smallest of squeals of rubber burning on the asphalt. Pull yourself together, Levi! he scolded himself. 

This fervent warning didn't stop him from taking a surreptitious glance or ten at Erwin's crotch at the next stoplight, and every stoplight thereafter. 

There's a dick in there, he thought to himself dreamily, eye fucking the ridge of the denim. What shall I call him? He fantasized about potential names for it the entire drive to the KBBQ place. 

Erwin, jr. Chubster McSmith. Russell the Love Muscle. Levi was making a mental list to himself already. 

* * *

 

Erwin kept looking down at his pants at stoplights. Was there a stain there that he wasn't aware of? Levi had been staring at it for the past eight minutes with a rather intense look on his face. erwin cleared his throat, coughed a bit. Levi didn't react, and he brushed it off to Levi just spacing out, exhausted and mentally drained from midterms.

Erwin could relate to that on a spiritual level.

* * *

 

Eren woke up with a groan. The early afternoon light streaming in through the cracked blinds in his bedroom window was far too bright, and his head was pounding something fierce, he really had to pee, and there was something - someone - very warm taking up a good three quarters of the extra long twin mattress. 

He also found himself in a quandary of simultaneous nausea and hunger. Quite problematic. 

He slowly turned over on the mattress, trying not to scrape his bare shoulder along the stucco wall in the process, taking a peek at the interloper in his bed. He all but shrieked when he discovered Jean from Health and Human Disease, waking up the other freshman with an unintentional, shocked shove to his solar plexus that had him rolling out of bed and thumping onto the floor with a squawk of indignation.  

"What the fuck was that for?" Jean snarled up at him from his prone position on the carpet, rubbing at his head in irritation. He seemed quite unperturbed by the whole encounter, and Eren goggled at him like a particularly mental goldfish as Jean hunted down his pants and T-shirt from the night before. Speaking of, what exactly had happened the night before? He remembered going to the TriDelt Anchor Splash fundrager, remembered being handed a cup of something called Jungle Juice, and after that? Well, nothing. He was relieved to see that Jean still had his boxers on, but that didn't stop him from taking a long, gratuitous peek at where Jean's pale skin dipped into black cotton. 

If Eren had bothered to read anything from freshman orientation week, he would have known that one should never, ever drink the Jungle Juice, an almost lethal combination of any available alcohols and Kool-Aid. Possibly fruit. For the nutrition. But, like most of his course material, and the alcohol education program the school required for graduation, Eren had skimmed through it and consequently had no recollection of being warned about it. 

"Sorry," he apologized, quite sincerely, trying to make amends. He was all aflutter, adoration replacing the initial shock. He'd spent the entire night with Jean! Together! In bed! The world did not hold enough exclamation points to adequately express his excitement. 

"Yeah, whatever," Jean replied, nonchalantly, tugging one leg through his jeans. "Wanna go get waffles?"

* * *

 

Levi was quite shocked to learn that Erwin and Mike not only knew each other, but were rather well acquainted. Then again, he probably should have expected it; the students in the university's business school were often a tight knit group. He shook his fist at the unseen gods who'd seen fit to admit all the attractive, bulky, blond men to the business school, saving none for the sciences. 

Levi was also rather shocked by how much meat they were able to put away, washed down with pitchers of cheap soju that the waiters didn't card for. It felt vaguely taboo, drinking in the daytime with a license that explicitly stated he was just barely a day over 20, and he smiled - leered - across the grill at Erwin, who was currently stuffing his face with beef brisket. Not even the popping oil that stung at his fingers could deter him from the utter joy that consumed him. 

Everyone who was anyone knew what a KBBQ date meant. What better way to bond than over massive platefuls of all you could eat meat? Despite the fact that they were surrounded by other students, laughing and chattering and stealing chopstickfuls of pasta salad, Levi had eyes only for Erwin.  

Mr. Pork Spear, he thought to himself, turning over the slab of pork belly that was currently sizzling on the circular grill in between them and deftly ignoring the flames that shot up between the metal bars. 

He resolved to download - perhaps illegally, perhaps not - Muse's entire discography when he got home. 

* * *

Armin clicked through his phone at the video he'd taken of Eren stumbling in the front door with Jean the previous night, and vaguely wondered if it would be ethical to upload it to the Campus SnapChat story. 

* * *

Petra had been quite busy with her study abroad applications, but she had spent most of Saturday comforting Mikasa with awkward pats to her back as the other girl ranted and raved about the utter betrayal of someone from her high school. Something to do with SnapChat. She finally managed to console her with her last remaining pint of Cherry Garcia, which Mikasa polished off in one sitting before rolling herself into a blanket burrito and dissolving into a heap on her bed. 

The clip in question had disappeared from the Campus SnapChat story by the time Petra got around to checking it later that evening as she procrastinated on her applications. 

 


	14. Hot Tamales

“You’ve got whipped cream on your cheek,” Jean informed Eren, spitting waffle crumbs all over the table. Eren, unfazed, wiped it off with the back of his hand. Jean squinted at him through his aviators, which he was wearing inside the diner to protect his eyes from the glare of the fluorescent lights overhead. Other patrons were giving him odd looks, but Eren wished he’d brought sunglasses of his own. Jean was quite smart, thinking of that. “You’re Jaeger, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Eren replied, trying to quell the excitement bubbling in the pit of his stomach. Jean had remembered his name! “Eren. I’m in your science GE.”

“Right, of course,” Jean replied, stabbing another bite of waffle, the tines of his fork clinking against his plate. “You’re pretty hot, you know that?” He all but leered across the table at Eren, who all but squawked in mortified delight. “We should do this again sometime.”

Eren’s phone buzzed on the table, a SnapChat from Levi, but he swiped the notification away, turning his phone face down, and turned back to Jean, agog with adoration.

* * *

 

At the ripe age of twenty and a third, Erwin Smith was starting to think that perhaps he needed to amend some changes to his academic habits, something he’d started promising to himself after every exam he’d ever taken since the first midterm cycle of freshman year. This really couldn’t go on, he grumbled to himself as he cleaned out his desk that Saturday evening, tossing all the empty cans of Red Bull and Monster Ultra Blue in a large garbage bag by his bed. It certainly wasn’t healthy, he scolded himself sternly as he bundled up his dirty clothes and carted them to the building’s laundry room, where he took up a full two washers. And he wasn’t even the type to sort it into light or dark.

Levi probably never had to buy those packets of 10 pairs of underwear because he’d run out and was too lazy to do laundry. He seemed like a very well put-together person who was on top of everything, and Erwin flung his laundry haphazardly into the washing machine as he wondered if perhaps Levi could assist him with, colloquially, getting his shit together. At the very least, Levi could help him with his economics studies, and maybe, if pressed, he’d divulge his secrets on how he always got his clothes to look so neatly creased.

The washing machine refused to cooperate, greedily eating Erwin’s quarters without remorse and without registering them, though Erwin could clearly hear the metallic clink as the coins fell to the bottom of the machine. This really was quite unfair, Erwin thought with irritation as he smacked the top of the washing machine quite vigorously, receiving a smarting palm for his troubles. He’d be willing to bet Levi never had problems with the washing machines; they probably docilely spat out his laundry in neat little piles, already crisply folded. The washer, after a few more kicks and a smatter of lively cursing, finally started with a clank and a swoosh of water swirling into the machine to soak and spin his clothes into a sudsy swirl.

Erwin had never been one for deep introspective self-analysis, but had he been, he would have sipped at his cup of tea, taken a few puffs on his soap bubble pipe, and inferred that he was, in fact, quite jealous of Levi. Some time after he’d dropped Levi and Mike off at their apartment, Levi had invited him over text to a movie that he had been planning to see with Petra that evening in downtown, because tonight was some discounted ticket night or something where you could lower the price from an outrageous $14 to a more conservative $11 if you had your student ID. Erwin had replied, perhaps too quickly and too bluntly, that he had plans for that night, and unfortunately would not be able to go.

At the time, he genuinely had had plans to go to the “end-of-midterms” mixer the business school was hosting in the basement of one of the more upscale restaurants on campus. But as the hours ticked on and he digested the frightening quantity of meat and soju he’d managed to consume, Erwin made an executive decision that this was turning out to be one of those exclusively Netflix and chill sort of nights.

Like, legit solo Netflix and chill, ordering delivery pizza and eat it sloppy on the couch in sweats and an old stained undershirt while he worked his way through the new season of Orange Is the New Black. When he’d started watching it a few months ago, he had thought Piper quite attractive and the show’s penchant for nudity and sexual encounters an excellent use of his time. However, he had lost interest in the story as of late, and no longer found Piper pretty, found the sex – dare he say it? – boring, which was something that worried him to no end.

He’d thought about taking Levi up on his offer, had thought about texting him back and saying that yeah, actually, he would like to go, but he stopped himself at the last minute. He didn’t want to appear too desperate, and he had no particular desire to be a third wheel to what looked to him to be a very lovely delightful relationship, if the campus SnapChat story was to be believed.

It was with a heavy heart that Erwin popped his laundry into the dryer, kicking the machine into submission, and set the alarm on his phone for an hour as he headed back upstairs to his studio to roll a joint, stare at the ceiling, and contemplate the vast meanings of life.

* * *

 

As close as it was to Valentine’s Day, the students in charge of the UTrost SnapChat story had decided on only posting themed submissions. Petra had submitted a picture of her and Levi waiting in the queue to buy movie tickets. Levi, begrudgingly, his eyebrows in a little furrow from mulling over Erwin’s latest response, had looked up from his phone, squinting in the light of the camera’s flashbulb.

Petra had thought he looked like a particularly grumpy little shrimp, and had spent the rest of the time in the queue drawing over the SnapChat photo to turn them into a salmon sashimi (her) and a shrimp sushi (him).

Had study abroad program applications been based on purely on how talented one was at drawing on SnapChat pictures, Petra would have had the admissions committees falling to their knees and begging her to take their seminars abroad in Paris, London, Athens.

But alas. It was a skill that went, for the most part, unnoticed, except for the little section under “Skills” in Petra’s resume, where she had blatantly and unapologetically mentioned ‘Graphic Design.’

The UTrost SnapChat story committee liked Petra’s submission so much that they ran it multiple times over the course of the week leading up to Valentine’s Day. Levi, who did not use SnapChat much, other than to send Petra weird faces at two in the morning and to send Eren passive-aggressive Snaps of the full trash bag when it was the freshman’s week to take out the trash, had no idea that his image as a shrimp roll had been seen by the vast majority of the student body as part of the Valentine’s Day submissions.

* * *

 

Levi could not concentrate on the movie at all, something with Colin Firth and Michael Caine. He was worried that Erwin might be mad at him, for some reason or another, if his reply to his text inquiry had been any indication.

 

_Levi (3:13 PM): hey do u wanna see a movie with me and petra tonight? [He hadn’t added a smiley face, and he had given himself a few hearty pats on the back for not giving in to temptation.]_

_Erwin <3 (3:15 PM): I’ve got plans, thx tho_

 

It was certainly a deviation from the proper punctuation and fully spelled out words that dominated Erwin’s texting style, and sounded rather abrupt.

Beside him, Petra pulled out her contraband, a liter bottle of water and a box of Hot Tamales, which she shook at Levi’s elbow, spilling the cinnamon candies into his lap. He took the opportunity to peek at his phone again, as if to confirm that he had no notifications from Erwin. Only one lone “Congratulations! You have a new match!” notification from Tinder greeted him, and the students around him hissed at him to turn his phone off, the glare was interfering with the movie – or, more likely, threatening to reveal wandering hands and other contraband food items smuggled in via purse or satchel.

Yes, he had put a heart next to Erwin’s name, and he had no intention of taking it off. Levi was a sucker for old-fashioned romance.

 


	15. Cinnamon

Erwin had scheduled tutoring sessions for microecon with Levi every Tuesday from 4-6 PM in the library basement. He shrugged aside his jealousy in regards to the other student, pushing thoughts of Levi and his perfect life with his perfectly pressed clothes and his lovely girlfriend who uploaded their pictures as salmon sushi and shrimp rolls to the campus geotag out of his mind. It reminded him disgustingly of what he and Marie used to have, of how they used to love and laugh together and feature prominently in each other’s Snap stories and Instagram and Twitter posts. Ever since they’d broken up, Erwin had all but stopped using those other forms of social media for leisure purposes.

And if he were to appear quite frequently in Mike’s SnapChat story, or got tagged in a lot of Facebook posts about fundragers and frat parties, well, he just chalked that up to networking. Very important for business majors, right up there with the ivory cardstock resume in a pristine leather portfolio that was always near at hand. Erwin wasn’t innocent of this, and was currently frowning at his rather…lacking resume and attempting to fill it out with activities and things he had participated in once or twice.

He was poring over it, waiting for Levi to show up for their tutoring session. The ivory cardstock, at $11 a packet of 100 sheets, was starting to feel limp in his hands from all the vigorous examination it had been subjected to in the past few weeks.

Attempts to find a summer internship and/or a job were proving futile, and so far, the only offers that Erwin had gotten back for interviews were from a) the Baskin Robbins on the corner of Quinn and Manchester, two blocks away from his studio apartment, and b) A data analyst intern position in one of the research labs at school, which he’d applied to purely out of sheer desperation. If these were the extent of his offers, Erwin, to be quite honest, would probably have gone with the job at Baskin Robbins. Data analysis sounded horrifyingly soul sucking, and Erwin was quite interested in not expiring from sheer boredom before he was an old and crusty seventy-three.

He would try to fluff the ice cream job into something that sounded even remotely impressive. He’d ask the counselors at the career center, he’d already decided, even though all of them were booked three months in advance for the graduating seniors. What else was his tuition money going towards if not for the right to make as many walk-in appointments on the fourth floor of the student union as he damn well pleased?

Retail associate? he mused to himself, clicking a pen he’d gotten at one of the career fairs in his left hand as he squinted down at the paper. No, that sounded too much like he was in the business of selling discounted tank tops and toe rings at some outlet store in the mall. That, and he was fairly sure his freshman roommate, Nile, had put something to that effect on his resume when all he’d really been doing was selling marijuana and Adderall to other students.

Dairy entrepreneur? No, that was just ridiculous. He wasn’t inventing anything, and he certainly had no aspirations of usurping the presidency of the ice cream company. This, and venture capitalism via mint chocolate chip, were well out of the question.

He tossed the pen in irritation across the table, where it skittered to a stop just shy of the edge. He was certain Levi wouldn’t have a problem with his resume. It was probably stacked full of his accomplishments and a stellar GPA, in 10 point Garamond.

“Feeling alright?” Levi asked from somewhere behind him. Erwin jumped, his heart stopping for a moment as he turned to Levi, who quirked an eyebrow at him. He was instantly ashamed of his childish display – he was 20, for Christ’s sake! – and leaned over the table to pick up the pen.

* * *

 

When Erwin had asked Levi if he would please be his tutor for the rest of the semester, and quite possibly the foreseeable future, Levi had been ecstatic. Not even Petra’s threat to stop inviting him over for Taco Night could put a damper on his enthusiasm.

He had agreed, and it had taken a tremendous amount of willpower to keep himself from adding extra exclamation points to his “Of course I will!!!” Three was an acceptable number, he’d decided, and Petra had just made unintelligible noises into her hands at her best friend’s foolishness. She had stopped short of strangling him because she needed his help with the rest of her study abroad applications, and, as a science major, Levi proved to be quite good at begging asking for grant money to do research, a skill which Petra fervently hoped would transfer over into her requests for a summer scholarship to cover her plane tickets and room and board.

When Levi got to the library, a paper cup of tea in his hand, Erwin had thrown a pen across the table in sheer frustration. He was looking over what appeared to be his resume, a mess of a document written in Comic Sans. Levi cringed.

“Feeling alright?” he asked, quirking an eyebrow at Erwin, who jumped in his seat before turning around to look at him. There was a furrow between his eyebrows, and his smile felt forced. He seemed irritated, and Levi wondered what could possibly be annoying the other student, but decided not to ask. He’d watched far too many romcoms to know that this was how the storyline played out. Next would come some dramatic scene in the rain, and Levi made a mental note to check the upcoming weather forecasts.

“Yeah, just looking over my resume.” Erwin pulled a face of disgust as Levi took a seat across from him, setting his cup of tea to the side. “I’m trying to find a job for the summer.”

“Oh yeah?” Levi asked, taking a sip of his tea. “What are you thinking about doing?”

“Anything that’ll take me, at this point,” Erwin groaned, running a hand through his hair and making it stick up on end as he took a final glance at his resume. “So far, it’s looking like a choice between data analyst extraordinare or ice cream vendor.”

“Could I take a look?” Levi asked. Erwin passed over the by-now rather crumpled resume. Levi’s eyes made a beeline for the header of the page, where Erwin’s personal information was listed for potential employers.

GPA: 3.76. Levi wanted to cry, drop out, and reapply to UTrost as a business major. Local address: 2689 Quinn St, Unit 18. Oh? That was the complex of studios on the far side of campus. No pesky roommates, no having to share the bathroom with a completely incompetent freshman who couldn’t remember to put the new trash bags in. But the monthly rent was exorbitant. Levi eyed Erwin across the table. The other sophomore looked rather dejected, staring at his hands and fiddling with a cinnamon sphere of eOS lip balm he’d pulled out of his backpack. He had nicked himself while shaving this morning, clearly, if the little remnant of toilet paper still stuck to his neck was any indication, and all in all, did not particularly look to be any more well off than anyone else. Levi could appreciate that.

His accomplishments were, well, to be quite honest, practically nonexistent. He hadn’t done too much outside of school, participating in a few clubs here or there, but only as a member. Levi’s heart all but stopped when he came across the little Comic San’d entry that Erwin was a member of the LGBT organization on campus.

The other sophomore was getting more and more attractive by the minute.

“Well,” he said, pushing the resume back across the table to Erwin, “if I could make a few suggestions –“

He was cut off by the sudden, harsh noise of buzzing. Erwin was gawking at the lip balm in his hand, which was vibrating quite loudly. Other students were staring, peeking over the tops of their study carrels, and Levi could feel a scarlet flush creeping up his neck at the dawning realization of what exactly the item was.

“Oh my God,” he whispered. “It’s a Mr. Pickles.”

“I beg your pardon?” Erwin squawked, horrified. Levi all but flung himself across the table to snatch the buzzing sphere from Erwin’s hand to twist it off, where it fell blessedly silent. The other students in the library tittered before returning to their studies, and Levi resolved to stop frequenting this particular building. He had a reputation to maintain, and it really would not do to become the student who’d been caught, red-handed, as it were, with a vibrator.

Erwin was beet-red as Levi prodded the device back towards him. “I had no idea,” he sputtered, apologetic. “It must have been Marie’s.”

Now that the other students seemed to have quieted down and returned to their own devices, Levi managed a smile and responded in what he prided himself on being his strongest voice that it was quite alright. He’d had some experience with such matters himself.

As he talked Erwin through his resume and how it might be changed for the better – not Comic Sans, for one – his mind wandered through and revised one of his favorite fantasies that he liked to visit on cold, lonely nights. Erwin featured quite prominently in his mental geotag, and he resolved to add a generous smattering of sex toys as well.

Maybe kisses? I love yous? No, no. He pinched his thigh roughly under the table. He didn’t want it to get too out of hand.

* * *

 

In one of the carrels in the library basement, Ymir opened an incognito page on her browser. She was supposed to be writing a paper on nitrates in processed foods, but this was too good a Google search to pass up.

She tapped away into the search bar. “Vibrators that look like eOS.” About 550,000 results, Google spat back at her, and she grinned, her paper all but forgotten. Krista’s birthday had passed a month or so ago, but presents were good at any time of the year.  


	16. Spicy

Erwin was all but infuriated, and rightly so. Levi had ripped through his resume with all the fury of ten thousand Huns swarming over the Chinese border, but unlike that Disney movie of which Erwin was so fond, he had had not even the single whiff of an opportunity to toss a fire into a pot of oil and alert all of China to the presence of Levi’s red pen scrawling through the (previously) ivory of his resume. “No, absolutely NO Comic Sans!” Levi had tutted, slashing viciously across the page with a vigor that nearly terrified Erwin out of his wits; he was sure the fine ballpoint tip of the pen would scribble directly through the page, and though this particular resume in question was far too mangled to present to potential employers anyway, the ivory card stock paper wasn’t exactly cheap.

When Levi had finished with his resume, shoving it back across the library table looking fifty shades of flushed and triumphant, Erwin had picked it up gingerly between his thumb and forefinger, examining the wreckage. Not a single line had been left untouched, and all that neon red was offending his delicate sensibilities. Business professors and TAs were in the habit of making corrections on exams in varying shades of greens and purples, something calming for their students’ eyes, and as such, the bright red looked particularly violent, as though Erwin had committed the gravest of offenses. It was not a good feeling to have, but he thanked Levi anyway as he folded away the resume to the recesses of his backpack to be fished out another day. As he was tucking it away into the front zip of his bag, he made extra sure not to brush against horrifyingly deceptive eOS turned vibrator that he’d tossed into the pouch as quickly as possible, trying to hide the incriminating evidence. Oh, who was he kidding? Erwin thought to himself, his eyebrow twitching rather furiously in irritation. Word traveled fast around the school, and he had no doubt that some of the students spread out around the library basement had already taken pictures and videos to upload to the campus SnapChat story. Well, with the exception of the particularly tired-looking girl who, through some remarkable feat of flexibility, had squeezed her entire body into the small space in between carrels, and was currently sleeping, her head pillowed on her backpack, coppery curls falling across her face.

Her carefreeness irritated Erwin irrationally. She clearly had no cares in the world, her textbooks splayed out across the table, anyone’s for the taking; she had no problems with potentially being photographed and displayed across the multiple, various platforms of social media that the undergraduate student body employed; she had the audacity to even be smiling a bit, the corner of her mouth tilting up as she dreamed about something pleasant that was more likely than not thoroughly unrelated to the severely highlighted textbook lying a few inches from her face.

She was pretty, in that sort of unprepossessing way, wholesome and lovely with a heart-shaped face and freckles like constellations across what Erwin could see of her cheekbones. No, she was more than pretty, she was downright gorgeous, and yet Erwin felt distanced from the entire thing. It irked him, terrifyingly so, and he cut his session with Levi short that day, feigning a headache and forcing a smile which he hoped was apologetic as he packed away his calculator and pencils and made to flee the library as quickly as possible.

Now, he flung his backpack unceremoniously onto the sofa, springs creaking in protest; the vibrator slash chapstick in the front pouch started up its angry buzzing again, but Erwin ignored it, running his hands through his hair, already wind-ruffled from his brisk walk home. He’d nearly gotten hit by two skateboarders, three bicyclists, and one very confused driver driving on the wrong side of the road, but he’d hardly noticed, his head swarming with thoughts.

Oh God, what’s wrong with me? This seemed to be a constant refrain, a soundtrack to his thoughts. This is thoroughly ridiculous, he thought angrily to himself as he kicked off his shoes, and peeled himself out of his jeans, the denim crumpling into a blue puddle on the floor as he stalked off to his bedroom, his white boxers with little red hearts fluttering in the mad slipstream of his marching. I’m a twenty year old male in the prime of my life.

He angrily clicked open an incognito browser on his laptop. Angrily opened a number of tabs, angrily jabbed at the keys, bringing up all sorts of illicit websites that would have sent his mother swooning into an early grave. The last time he’d phoned her, she’d had a note of hope in her voice, asking if he couldn’t possibly make it up with Marie, and through great fortitude and his third Bacardi and Coke of the night, he’d informed her, in no uncertain terms, that he and Marie would most certainly never be getting together again.

And there was the matter of how Levi had looked at him, too, handing him back his slaughterhouse of a resume. The other student was nice enough, intelligent and helpful and with a humor drier than the Sahara, but Erwin, if he was being well and truly honest with himself, felt quite threatened. The split second that had passed between them, the resume changing hands, had been loaded with something that felt dangerously like intimacy. Levi’s eyes had caught and held his own, and Erwin had noticed how damn long his eyelashes were, how his eyes were a dark grey with maybe flecks of blue?

He had looked…almost attractive.

No. Erwin slapped himself, glaring viciously at his laptop screen as though it had personally offended him. Two hot Russian babes in his neighborhood were just dying to meet him, a pop-up window claimed, but after several agonizingly long moments of trawling through the vast pornographic archives of the Internet, Erwin tucked away a rather dejected Russell back into his boxers and got up to wash his hands of the whole matter.

* * *

 

“We definitely connected today,” Levi informed Petra over a plate of tacos. Nonchalantly. Petra nearly choked on a triangle of taco shell, and Levi thumped her vigorously on the back.

“You connected?” she spluttered, spitting shreds of lettuce in Levi’s general vicinity. Clearly she’d been out of the loop, too caught up in her study abroad applications. “You absolute whore!” She was grinning across the table at him, almost manically, and Mikasa, who had dragged herself out of her Eren-induced stupor long enough to join them for a taco or three, goggled between the two of them, breathless with anticipation. She had certainly never called anyone a whore, or at least, not in a place where other people could hear (though she had resoundingly cursed out Jean Kirstein over Facebook Messenger quite recently; once she’d recovered from the shock of seeing her so-called “loyal” classmate and her love interest stumbling through an apartment door on the campus SnapChat story, she had unleashed a torrent of vitriol that would put even the most hardened sailor to shame). Her head swiveled back and forth between Levi and Petra, taking note of the interaction and wondering how it would play out.

“Oh, God,” Levi muttered in disgust, balling up his napkin and throwing it across the table. “Not like that.” Petra looked visibly disappointed, and sunk back into her tacos. “I haven’t quite gotten to the part where his dick is up my ass.”

It was Mikasa’s turn to choke on taco shell. Levi thumped her vigorously on the back. Was that what Eren and Jean were doing? she wondered as she took a few frantic sips of water. Which one was the dick, and which one was the ass? Her face colored as she thought of the myriad possibilities.

“Oh,” Petra mumbled, her attention lost. “Did he look at you nicely or something like that?”

Levi sniffed, reaching for another taco. “He looked at me nicely, AND our fingers brushed,” he affirmed, but his words fell on deaf ears. Petra’s attention had already turned back to her applications, and Mikasa was far gone in the wondrous creations of her own imagination.

* * *

 

Jean and Eren, meanwhile, were doing nothing of the sort. No. Rather, they were curled up cramped like sardines in Eren’s bed, partaking in the age-old tradition of Netflix and chill. And, unlike some other usages of the phrase, they really and truly were watching Netflix and chilling. Eren, who’d surreptitiously snagged a few brownies from a paper plate in the fridge, was trying to ignore the way his stomach was growling for sustenance; Jean couldn’t stop laughing at the plot of the horror movie they were trying to watch. At around 11:45 PM, Eren flung himself out of bed, struggling into his jeans to the tune of Jean’s giggles, and asked him if he wouldn’t be opposed to going to the 24-hour Mexican place on the corner for a burrito or twelve. Jean was not opposed, and they even held hands as they stumbled down the sidewalk.

Eren sighed dreamily as Jean worked his way through his third burrito, leaning over to pat him on the back as Jean choked on a particularly spicy jalapeno. But goodness, he was adorable, tousled hair and unzipped hoodie, the walls spinning around him.

"Yer my boyfriend," Jean informed him, slurred words altogether too loud for the vaguely Latin sounding elevator music being piped over the staticky speaker system spitting shreds of lettuce across the table. Eren all but swooned.   


	17. Warm

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If I were to do a "pick-your-path" thing for this fic, with alternate scenarios along with the main story as well as a more expansive erejean storyline, would this be something you guys might be interested in? Drop a comment below and lmk! 
> 
> xoxo, Misaya

Erwin felt like he was going insane. He’d spent the better part of the last hour in his Intro to Finance in the Private Sector lecture moodily swiping right to anyone and everyone on Tinder, boy or girl be damned. He wasn’t even looking at the profile pictures anymore, and took a sort of grim satisfaction in every match that he got, the smoky dark screen pinging up to inform him that he had a new match. Good, he thought glumly to himself, at least I haven’t lost everything quite yet. He might have completely lost his virility, but at least he still had his dashing good looks, and the balance in his bank account – well, okay, fine, his parents’ bank accounts – wasn’t something to sniff at. It was more than enough to pay for a timeshare in Las Vegas, a part-time ownership of a holiday cabin up in Tahoe, and other various assorted things that Erwin occasionally took advantage of.

His professor was droning on about the eccentricities of the stock market, and Erwin sighed, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands, trying to quell the pounding headache that was building at the base of his skull, drilled into his cranium with every monotonous word and every click of the chalk against the blackboard. He hadn’t even been drinking, had vowed to try and cut back – his mother had sent him several e-mails with attached articles informing him about the dangers of alcohol exposure in university, and a stern reminder that Erwin was not yet of legal age to be anywhere near alcohol. Erwin had snorted at the email, but had privately agreed; he was doing far too much drinking, and those news articles had had rather a, no pun intended, sobering effect on his constitution.

But no. This headache had nothing to do with alcohol consumption, as today was a Tuesday and Erwin did have a few principles he aimed to stand by for now, and the rest of his college career.

A)   Do not mix your liquors (any more than he already had)

B)   Under no circumstances drink the Jungle Juice (well, he’d been guilty of that, but in his defense Mike had told him the pink liquid was heavily infused with strawberry vodka, and Erwin was a massive slut for strawberry vodka)

C)    Do not drink on a Monday evening. Have some standards!

The professor coughed, his frill of white hair shaking as he all but hacked up half a lung, and, much to his horror, Erwin found his throat itching in sympathy. No, no, no, he scolded himself, pinching at his thigh through the thick denim of his jeans as though he could singlehandedly defend his immune system against the multitudes of bacteria that he was sure were swarming through the recycled air of the building at this very moment.

It would be just his luck, too, he thought miserably, still swiping right absentmindedly on his phone, to get sick right after midterms had already ended.

Congratulations! You have a new match! the Tinder gods proclaimed as he swiped right yet again, jotting down a few haphazard notes on supply and demand and the current exchange rate between the United States and the European Union. Congratulations, Erwin thought savagely, eyes watering as he tried to hold back a cough. 200 plus matches, and not a single spark.

The professor coughed again. Erwin coughed.

* * *

 

On the other side of campus, Levi dug his phone out of the pocket pouch of his hoodie, ignoring the glares that his classmates were giving him as they raised their hands and asked the population genetics professor to please repeat her last few sentences, there had unfortunately been a bit of a distraction. Levi was immune to their hostile stares – it was only the second lecture after their first midterm, and as far as he was concerned, there was no reason to be quite so snippy about it. Everyone knew the real difficult material wouldn’t pop up again until at least four lectures after the exam, so Levi felt quite justified in pulling out his phone and pressing his thumb to the fingerprint sensor to unlock it.

Congratulations! You have a new match! his phone screen informed him, the Tinder app opening as he swiped right on the notification, curious. He rarely got matches on Tinder, whether because his profile wasn’t attractive enough in both senses of the word, or because most of the male population at UTrost were painfully heterosexual or just so far in the depths of the proverbial closet that they were practically halfway to China at this point.

He tried to quell his anticipation as the app loaded slowly, far too slowly, in his opinion. His leg started jiggling, a nervous, anticipatory habit he’d tried to quell in the past, but he couldn’t contain himself. The girl sitting two seats down from him glared rather viciously at him; his leg-jiggling was rippling the water in her ecofriendly water bottle, and offending her delicate sensibilities.

“Can you stop shaking your leg?” she hissed at him, her eyes narrowed, and Levi forcibly had to restrain himself from sticking his tongue out at her and informing her that her eyeliner was done up all wrong. He’d certainly have never left the house like that, he thought, with a sniff of disdain. Her attention swung back to the professor, who was now rambling on about copulation plugs in Mus musculus or something inane of the sort, and Levi’s attention swerved back down to his screen.

His breath caught in his throat.

Erwin

Matched on 2/21

He couldn’t quite make out the little circular avatar on Erwin’s profile, but if it was, and oh God, how he hoped, if it was, if it was –

With a trembling finger, he tapped at the little circle, watching with bated breath as it enlarged into a chat screen, informing him that he’d matched with Erwin 3 minutes ago. And, yes, tapping on Erwin’s profile, it was none other than Erwin Smith (Erwin <3) and Levi all but swooned, blessing Steve Jobs and Sean Rad and Justin Mateen for all that they’d done for him, sure that he could die happy now.

As the class wrapped up, the professor had barely finished covering the last slide before Levi was shooting out of his seat, suppressed excitement rendering him far too impatient to wait for the other students sitting closer to the aisle to finish packing up their belongings and exit their seats. He all but crawled over his classmates, ignoring their glares and furious passive-aggressive gestures at him as they lifted their laptops and half-drunk cups of coffee out of his way.

No, this was far more important than retaining dignity and self-esteem in the eyes of people he’d probably never see again after graduation. And fuck them, he thought gleefully to himself, he was sure none of them had matched with Erwin Smith on Tinder. (This was actually supremely untrue; the concentration of thirsty students in the UTrost science majors was unparalleled, perhaps something to do with the amounts of time spent cooped up and repressed in the library carrels, or perhaps related to the vigorously toxic chemicals said students were exposed to at great lengths during various points in their undergraduate careers. As such, Erwin Smith had, as a matter of fact, matched with quite a few people in Levi’s major, some of whom were in the very same lecture hall.)

But wait. Levi slowed his frantic walk out of the building, his calves burning, his breath running ragged in his chest. It wouldn’t do to appear too eager. It wasn’t like he loved Erwin, after all. He chuckled nervously to himself as he consulted the app. Less than a mile away, it informed him. He switched to data, giving up on the spotty campus wireless, and made for the business school buildings, keeping track of the distance, which updated to 1000 feet away, 850 feet away…

No, it definitely wasn’t love, Levi consoled himself as he ran a hand through his hair and checked out his reflection in a passing window, ignoring the way the students inside gawped at him like uncultured imbeciles. Surely not. Levi was just a twenty-year-old male in the prime of his life and sexual potential, and any wayward feelings of the romantic notion were most likely a misguided combination of hormones and indulgent self-fantasy.

500 feet away. He stopped himself abruptly in the middle of the walk to adjust the strap of his messenger bag digging into his shoulder. He nearly got hit by a bicyclist who screamed curses at him as she hurtled past to promptly collide with a skateboarder twenty yards away.

This really wouldn’t do, he scolded himself. He had to act more composed. Really now! He was Levi Ackerman, and his mother had raised him better than this. Speaking of his mother, somewhere in Levi’s subconscious, he was already laying out plans for the future, bringing Erwin home for Thanksgiving, bringing him home for Christmas, maybe kissing (or fucking) him under the mistletoe. Oh, no, no, no, that wouldn’t do, he reprimanded himself, his recently readjusted hair getting mussed in the slipstream from another passing bicyclist who shouted at him to get out of the bike path. He had to have more class than that. And he really had to exhibit some self-control once in a while. Maybe get to the gym more than once every half year or something.

And so, with a great show of willpower and restraint, Levi swiped back to the chat room again, and typed in: “Hey! Fancy seeing you here :)”

The smiley face was his reward for being conservative. He turned his steps towards the on-campus café, secretly patting himself on the back for being so reserved, and sneaking glimpses at his cell phone every three seconds, thoroughly unaware of the catastrophes his inattention had wrought behind him. February 21 would go down in history as the day with the most vehicular accidents at UTrost, and the very next semester, the university government would install a higher premium on health insurance for just such incidents.

But Levi was in love, though he didn’t know it yet, and he was able to ignore (and utterly be unaware of) his several near brushes with death as he crossed through the campus center and pushed open the door to the café.

* * *

 

“Jesus Christ,” Jean gasped as he staggered into Eren’s apartment a few hours later, his elbows scraped and his hair ruffled, looking distinctly the worse for wear. Eren looked up from his physics homework, adoringly. He’d already put off his kinematics homework for days, a few more hours wouldn’t matter, surely, and with that logic firmly in mind, he stood up to peck Jean on the cheek.

“What happened?” he asked, smiling fondly, doe-eyed, as Jean peeled off his jacket and brushed aside a few empty cracker packets before slumping onto the squeaky couch, scattering Eren’s notes everywhere. “You look like you got hit by a truck.”

“This guy was standing in the middle of the bike path,” Jean explained, running a hand through his hair, making the ash blonde strands stick up on end. “I nearly ran into him. Fell over the handlebars.”

Eren tutted. “Oh, you poor bab,” he replied, sympathetically. “Want me to kiss it better?”

“I’ve got other places you can kiss better,” Jean informed him, leering rather lecherously like something one might see in a porn video hailing from the ‘80s, and while Eren was working out whether or not to slap him or indulge him, the door opened and Levi barged in. The two of them jumped apart, as though Levi were an RA, come here to ensure such mundane things like they were maintaining a proper distance of at least six inches between the two of them in the common areas and that there were no dishes moldering in the sink. The former was untrue, and the latter was very, very untrue, but Levi just looked at them over the bridge of his nose with an inscrutable expression before disappearing into his room, the door clicking shut firmly behind him.

“That was him!” Jean whispered, eyes wide, staring at the closed door. “The suicidal maniac in the bike path.”

“Was it?” Eren asked vaguely, the moment lost, trying to extract his graphing calculator from beneath Jean’s thigh. “He must have a lot on his mind or something. Come on, get up, I need to do some homework.”

Quick-witted as ever, Jean informed him that he needed to do him instead. Eren smacked him on the hand with his recently liberated calculator.


	18. Candle

“u mind if we postpone today’s sesh, nt feeling too hot” (Erwin <3, 11:42 AM)

Levi pouted at the message notification on his screen, holding his phone out of the reach of Petra’s grabby hands. They had just dropped off her study abroad applications in the school administration office, and were currently on their way to get lemonade at the recently renovated café on the second story of the campus center. Petra had been utterly discouraged by the vast, unruly pile of papers that had overflowed the metal wire basket of the application deposit box, but had visibly perked up when Levi had, with some reluctance, offered to treat her to a drink of lemonade. She was, after all, a college student, and would never be one to turn down the promise of free food. That would have been a particularly foolish move, and Levi was all but rolling in money; he and Erwin had recently worked out a payment schedule through Venmo.

Yes, Levi did mind postponing, and not because he was particularly strapped for cash at the moment (though that might not keep up if Petra kept goggling at the fancy macarons and slices of cake behind the glass windows in the café). He wanted to see Erwin, wanted to make hasty explanations about his Tinder behavior. Erwin hadn’t replied to his message, even though he’d been active on the application; Levi might or might not have been keeping tabs on the updated time status beneath Erwin’s profile picture. He’d written out a myriad number of reasons for what might have possessed him to send such a message through an app with such a reputation, had written them all out in a neat little diagram on the whiteboard hanging on the back of his bedroom door that he normally used to plan out outlines for his papers and to keep track of the division of labor used to keep the shared areas of the apartment in somewhat of a habitable state. 

Speaking of the shared areas, he’d really have to talk to Eren about disposing of his condom wrappers properly. Levi had sat down on the couch more than a few times to hear the cushions crinkling underneath his weight, and with wrinkled nose and an expression that was equal parts horrified and envious, had stuffed a hand beneath the pillows to come up with fistfuls of silver foil packets. Perhaps he’d be able to use the evidence as a way to blackmail the freshman into paying for the prompt professional cleaning of the sofa.

“You’re not even listening to me,” Petra grumbled as he absentmindedly handed over his credit card to the cashier, who swiped it and handed him two plastic cups of lemonade – watermelon rosemary for him, and blueberry mint for her.  “All of it is Erwin this, Erwin that, Erwin everywhere. Well, that’s the last time I put in a good word for you.”

“What?” he asked, pocketing his wallet again and nudging her towards a table that had just recently opened up. Another girl and her friend had clearly spotted the same opportunity, and Levi picked up his pace, nearly lathering himself into a sweat as he power walked across the campus center to slam his hands down in victory on the wrought iron of the vacant table. He’d really have to start working out more. His lemonade tasted like victory, and he grinned gleefully as the other girl glared dirtily at him, grabbed her friend’s hand, and marched off. “What did you say?”

“I said, there’s a party at ADPi on Friday. We should go,” Petra replied, rummaging through her backpack and pushing a slightly crumpled glossy flyer across the table to him.

“Oh? Why’s that?” Levi asked, watching with mild amusement as a particularly brave sparrow hopped up onto the table next to them and pecked at an absent student’s sandwich with great interest.

“Because,” Petra replied, taking a sip of her lemonade, “I heard on good authority that they’re gonna have chocolate cake Smirnoff. You’re a huge slut for chocolate cake Smirnoff.”

Levi gnawed at the straw thoughtfully. “Is that all?” he asked. If this was Petra’s attempt to get his mind off Erwin, who was probably all but wasting away in his studio apartment on 2689 Quinn St. Unit 18, it was a rather pathetic one, and Levi informed her as much.

“Well, no,” she scoffed, rolling her eyes dramatically. “But there won’t be an entrance fee for you, since you’ll be bringing me and Mikasa. Come on, Levi! Free chocolate cake vodka. Free! You’ve been pining over Erwin for three thousand years, God knows why. It’s not like his dick comes money and chocolate.”

Levi sighed, tracing little hearts in the condensation on his plastic cup. “Maybe it does,” he replied moodily. Erwin hadn’t yet read his message asking him if he was alright, and Levi wondered if it would be over the top to assume that he was convulsing on his deathbed even now.

“Oh, my God, you’re thinking about calling for an ambulance for him, aren’t you?”

“…No,” he hedged, but Petra was having none of it.

“He’s a big boy. He can take care of himself,” she said decisively, standing up. Levi looked reluctantly at the table, which he had worked so hard to secure; even now, the girls from before were homing in on the prime real estate of their seating. “It’s not like we’re supposed to fall in love in college, anyway,” Petra informed him as she pulled him out of his seat, much to his consternation. “We’ve got the rest of our lives for that shit. Come on, I’m starving.”

* * *

 

Petra would have been horrified to discover that, despite her explicit instructions, Levi had headed over to Erwin’s studio apartment not even two hours later, a Tupperware of homemade chicken noodle and pepper soup held carefully in his hands.

Levi would have been horrified to discover that he was really well and truly in love.

Eren would have been horrified – no, scratch that, he was bloody mortified – to discover a bowl outside his bedroom door, filled to the brim with silver condom wrappers, and topped with a bright pink Post-it in Levi’s writing asking him to please clean the communal living area. It even had a smiley face, and, fearing for his life, Eren enlisted Jean to overhaul the entire living room to remove evidence of their incriminating acts. In retrospect, this had been a hideous idea, and more incriminating acts were committed, much to the consternation of all parties involved.

* * *

 

Ymir sat down quickly at the wrought iron table the couple had so recently vacated, exulting in her triumph as Krista sat down across from her and pulled out a sandwich. She handed half of it over to Ymir, and Ymir grabbed her wrist and planted a little fluttering kiss to Krista’s fingertips, laughing at the blush that spilled over her girlfriend’s face.

* * *

 

Depositing her at her next class, Levi all but ran home, jabbing a frantic text to his mother to ask for her special soup recipe that had gotten his younger self through many a flu season. Somewhat bemused, his mother had texted back with a list of ingredients, finished with a “Love you, sweetie!” that he’d hurriedly replied to with a hasty “LY2” as he’d hurried to the supermarket and thrown said ingredients haphazardly into a shopping basket. Chicken, potatoes, pepper, onions. A clove of garlic. The cashier looked vaguely surprised as he piled the items onto the conveyor belt. It had been quite a while since she’d seen any self-respecting college student buying what looked to be the trimmings of an actual meal.

Hurrying home, Levi barged in on Eren and Jean, who were unashamedly canoodling on the sofa, but he didn’t have time for those shenanigans. He dashed into the kitchen, chopping and boiling and stirring in a fury that would certainly have given him at least a fighting chance on an episode of Iron Chef America. Ladling the soup into a heat-proof Tupperware, Levi dashed out the door again before remembering.

Sticking his head back in again, he informed Eren, who was now very unashamedly sporting a series of nearly violent looking hickeys, that it was his week for the trash and could he please remember to keep those sorts of activities to the confines of his own room, he was scarring Armin, whose innocence Levi was determined to protect at all costs.

Armin was far from innocent, and had, on more than one occasion, used photographic blackmail to coerce Eren into taking over his chores. As such, he had not mopped the kitchen or cleaned out the frostbitten salmon from the back of the freezer for weeks.

* * *

 

Swallowing roughly, Levi shifted the Tupperware to one hand while he raised the other to knock on the door of 2689 Quinn St. Unit 18. The halfhearted salad he’d had with Petra earlier sat heavily in his stomach, and despite the fact that she’d prodded and pestered him to eat more than a few leaves of lettuce, he’d been utterly unable to.

No. He had to do this now before he lost his nerve. That, and the tenant of Unit 14 across the hall was peering at him suspiciously through a gap in her blinds.

He rapped firmly, smartly against the wood, three times. And then three more, after a lengthy pause. Was it possible Erwin was out? he fretted to himself. And, if so, was it possible Erwin had been lying to him? Maybe he’d stepped out to get cough medicine and he’d gotten hit by a bus and even now he was in some back alley getting split open by a Mexican drug cartel who would stuff his corpse with cocaine to haul him back across the border –

The door cracked open, and Erwin peered out at him, bloodshot eyes and sleep-ruffled hair, a crop of dark stubble growing over his jawline. He was wearing a ratty university sweatshirt that looked like it had probably seen better days, and a pair of loose plaid pajama pants, the drawstring tied in a bow that was slung low on his hips. Levi gawped at him for a moment, trying not to fall into an intense relationship of mutual attraction with the dip of the V that he could see disappearing into the waistband of Erwin’s pajamas in the gap between his sweatshirt and his pants. The small bits of hair that Levi could just make out in the shadows were a dark gold, and Levi all but frothed at the mouth at the thought that the curtains matched the drapes, and that Erwin was anything but a bottle blonde. Not that he’d ever suspected him of it in the first place.

“Levi?” Erwin asked, his voice congested, and Levi’s mind returned back to the reason for his visit. “What are you doing here?”

He held up the Tupperware of soup. “I figured you might be feeling a bit shitty, and your apartment was on the way, so I thought I’d just drop by. Hope you feel better soon!” He had planned to drop off the soup and make a quick escape, but Erwin nudged the door open a bit more, and, much to his surprise, apologized for the mess and invited him inside.

* * *

 

The soup was still warm as Erwin ladled it out into two bowls that he frantically washed in the kitchen sink. His other dishes were currently trying their hardest to evolve into sentient life, moldering away in the sink, but he didn’t have the heart to deal with it at the moment.

“Sorry, I didn’t have any spoods,” he mumbled apologetically as he passed Levi a plastic spoon he’d pilfered from the campus center. “This is really nice of you.” He paused to hack up half a lung into the crook of his elbow. “I musta gotted that bug that’s goid aroud.”

Of course, Levi could sympathize. But, being as he was abnormally responsible, he’d gotten his flu shot back at the start of flu season last October, because, as he rationalized to himself, he was paying for the school’s special health insurance program, so he might as well get the most of it.

“Here, drink up,” he said with a smile. “It’ll help you get better quickly. My mom used to make it all the time for me when I was a kid.”

Erwin watched as Levi bent his head over the bowl of soup, his cheeks flushed and his glasses fogging up with the steam. It was the first human contact he’d had in days, and he found himself entranced with how Levi blew at the hot spoonfuls of soup, lips pursed.

After the dishes had been cleared away – Levi had pulled up his sleeves and cleaned through the jungle of moss growing in Erwin’s sink – Levi handed him a capful of medicine and a bottle of water and instructed him to get himself to bed to rest.

“I’ll put the rest of the soup in the fridge for you,” Levi informed him as Erwin crawled into the nest of blankets he’d built for himself. Ah. A queen bed. Nice. No, down boy, not now, he scolded the insistent boner he’d been sporting since Erwin had opened the door. “Get better quickly, okay?”

Levi let himself out with a soft click, and was barely able to make it out of the apartment complex without falling all over himself and cheering and congratulating himself for a job well done. He’d infiltrated enemy(?) quarters successfully, and all without dissolving into a puddle of pure lust. Though, admittedly, he’d been hard pressed (hard? Yes, yes he was.) when Erwin had stretched, the altogether too small sweatshirt pulling taut across his chest.

With a grin of satisfaction, Levi narrowly missed being sideswiped by two cars as he jaywalked across the street and began his two mile trek home. He’d heard that Idomeneo by Mozart had a particularly loud number, and he had no plans for the rest of the day.

* * *

 

Relaxing into his pillows, Erwin sighed with satisfaction. He felt mellow, a bit dizzy, tired with a clean fatigue that the soup resting full in his belly only helped to further along. Goodness, he thought to himself as he drifted off to sleep, lulled by a combination of warmth and fullness and a nose that seemed finally to be clearer than it had been of late. 

Levi was far too kind, far too lovely – Marie had certainly never brought by soup when he’d been debilitatingly sick in freshman year with the infamous three day hangover that most freshmen fell victim to after their first frat party.

Erwin rolled himself into his pillows, wondering what it might be like to kiss Levi. A small bit of his conscious brain protested, but he was far too tired to complain, far too tired to argue with himself, and he allowed these small indulgences as he drifted off into his dreams.

 


	19. Spark

The theme at ADPi that night was masquerade. It wasn’t particularly original, and it wasn’t particularly fun, but Levi was all in favor for any occasion that let him wear the Phantom of the Opera inspired mask he’d made in high school for some art appreciation project or another. He’d slaved over it, long, sleepless nights, fingers coated with plaster of Paris, and Gerard Butler’s brooding expression all but burnt into his laptop screen. To date, it was the only operatic piece that Levi had watched fully, and it appeared multiple times on the myriad lists he had planned out for what he wanted to do on his twenty-first birthday. (Get wasted and go to a Chippendale’s show was currently held highly in regard, because Levi was currently in that period of his life where he was trying to determine exactly how ratchet he was – see: very – but on particularly classy nights Levi thought that he would like to instead get a nice shade of intoxicated – perhaps on cheap champagne and little bottles from the mini-bar – and go and watch the Phantom of the Opera in The Venetian.)  

Petra, for her part, deeply regretted ever showing him the flyer. She should have just dragged him to the party. Levi had conned her into going as Christine, yet again, turning his puppy-dog look on full wattage and reminding her that he had helped her with a significant portion of her study abroad applications, and that, had he had his way, he would be curled up in a blanket burrito at this very moment and watching Netflx with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey. As such, she was currently sitting on the very edge of the couch in Levi’s living room, waiting for him to finish applying the rest of his pancake makeup. Eren and Jean, who had clearly been in the middle of something before Levi had burst in with Petra, were squashed into the armchair on the other side of the coffee table. Petra stared at them. They stared at her. She sincerely hoped the silver-white stains she’d noted on the back of one couch cushion were from vanilla pudding or whipped cream or something of the sort, but with the way the two freshmen were goggling at her, she was quite sure she knew exactly what they’d been up to.

“Don’t tell Levi,” Eren all but begged her as the bathroom door closed. Petra nodded in acquiescence, remembering her own freshman escapades all too well, and turned the couch cushion over so the other side – stained more acceptably with what was either blood, ketchup, or grape juice – was visible.

Mike’s bedroom door opened, and a girl clad in nothing but a loose, large T-shirt slipping off her shoulder, minced her way out of the room. Levi flung the bathroom door open just as Petra was trying to determine whether the girl was wearing underwear or not, and he all but collided with Mike’s latest paramour, who at least had the good graces to look embarrassed. Petra took it as a sign of Erwin’s hold over Levi that Levi didn’t even bat an eyelash at her; the last year, she’d had to comfort Levi over many weekends and many pints (okay, gallons) of ice cream whenever he’d call her up and woefully tell her that Mike had slept with yet another girl. Alas. The plight of the chronically straight.

Levi fidgeted with the cravat he was wearing around his neck. Eren and Jean fidgeted in the armchair. Petra fidgeted on the couch, eager to get to the party and drink her weight in free alcohol before the police or campus security showed up.

On their way out the door, Levi firmly told Eren to please use his own room for such inappropriate activities. Eren, who had been sneaking towards the recently vacated couch again, colored like a tomato and blubbered something that might have been an agreement.

* * *

 

“I’m sorry, but you know what happened the last time we fucked in your room,” Jean said nonchalantly, leaning against the kitchen counter as Eren rummaged through the fridge, looking for food whose absence wouldn’t be quite as conspicuous. These stuffed mushrooms looked promising.

Yes, he remembered quite well. The last time they’d been rolled together in his sheets, they had been rather rudely interrupted by noises and vigorous movements from Mike’s room. Mike’s bed, which was set against the wall in between his and Eren’s rooms, was prone to bang against the wall. At first, they’d thought it had been some sort of earthquake, had contemplated for about half a second about moving – no, they’d rather risk imminent death, Eren had been all but balls deep in Jean at the time – but it had quickly turned out to be anything but.

The slams of Mike’s headboard against the wall had been punctuated with groans and then shrieks that sounded frighteningly like a feral animal, and Eren, despite his vigorous teenage libido, had gone pathetically soft. Jean, in disbelief, had threatened to jerk off to lesbian porn if Eren didn’t continue right this minute, but another vigorous bang pounded the headboard against the wall, sending a small cloud of plaster showering from the ceiling, and knocking Jean, whose balance on the mattress had been tentative at best, off the edge of the bed.

Levi and Petra were going to the ADPi party, so, by his calculations, they’d be gone for a good four hours. Eren tugged the paper plate of stuffed mushrooms out of the fridge. Couch it was, then.

 

* * *

 

Four hours was being a bit generous. ADPi, being one of the more generous frats on campus, hadn’t skimped on the alcohol, and Levi quickly found himself and Petra squashed into a corner of the couch in the frat’s living room, passing a frosted bottle of chocolate cake vodka back and forth. Petra was at that point in the night where she was scanning the crowd eagerly with bright amber eyes, looking for a hook-up, and Levi was at that point in the night where he was contemplating his existence and wondering about the origin of carne asada fries. The bass throbbed through his bloodstream, and someone was pressing a tiny plastic packet of pink pills into his hand, the shiny surfaces marked with E’s, or perhaps they were M’s? W’s? Candies? Levi fuzzily wondered, giggling as he took another swallow of vodka, which no longer burned as it made its way down his throat. E for Erwin! The universe was speaking to him, he thought excitedly to himself, pulling his phone out and clicking through his contacts. The screen seemed to shimmer away beneath his fingertips as he tapped out a message.

 

* * *

 

Erwin’s phone buzzed on his coffee table, covered with weed-related paraphernalia. Levi’s chicken soup had worked wonders, and, in the spirit of preserving his recovery, Erwin had stayed home from the ADPi party and had instead decided to rest a bit. Relaxation and food were key for getting better quickly, and, per this adage, Erwin had also taken it upon himself to order a pizza and garlic knots. The box currently occupied the other half of the coffee table, half-empty, and Erwin was at that stage of the night where time was passing about half as quickly as it normally did.

With leaden fingers, he unlocked his phone. He was tickled pink to discover that he had a message from Levi. The other student’s Tupperware had been washed to within an inch of its life and dried with great care; the sponge on the side of Erwin’s sink had never seen such vigorous action, and the dishtowel could second that opinion.

“Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrwiiiiiiiiin im at adpi gonna comqovr” (12:58 AM). Erwin deciphered this as “Erwin, I’m at ADPi, I’m gonna come over.”

A few minutes later, someone banged on his door, and he got up to open it. The walls were pulsing lightly around him as he opened the door, Levi all but spilling into his studio, giddy, the neck of an opaque bottle of Smirnoff held loosely in his fist. Erwin was impressed. It wasn’t every day that one – especially a guy – could pilfer a bottle of alcohol from a frat party seemingly without consequence.

“Omagawd.” Levi’s voice was loose around his syllables as he staggered into the apartment, using the walls and Erwin for support as he clumsily toed off his shoes. “You’re smooooking.”

He giggled, and Erwin giggled in response. It was utterly absurd, this whole situation was far beyond surreal, and he wasn’t exactly in the proper frame of mind to deal with this. Levi plopped himself on the couch, the cushions squeaking beneath him, and reached for a slice of pizza.

Erwin plopped down next to Levi on the couch, reaching for the bottle of vodka and slugging back a healthy swig, which burned at the back of his throat. Oh, God. It was almost sickly sweet, and he hurriedly reached for a garlic knot to get rid of the overwhelming taste of chocolate cake. He wobbled as he leaned over, and grabbed at the couch cushions to steady himself. They were surprisingly warm, surprisingly squishy beneath his grasp, and he looked over to find his fingers splayed out and steadied against Levi’s thigh.

Levi goggled at him. Erwin goggled right back. He was sure he had committed some massive social faux pas, but Levi didn’t look particularly offended, and, anyway, it was far too hard to take the other student seriously, not with the marinara mustache he was sporting, at least.

“I, uh, I’m sorry,” Erwin mumbled quickly, making to remove his hand as quickly as possible. Perhaps Levi was inebriated enough to forget about this whole ordeal, and perhaps Erwin was stoned enough to believe that he’d imagined how gorgeous he thought Levi currently was, plaster mask hanging askew off one cheekbone and sauce mustache and all.

* * *

 

In his defense, Levi was three sheets to the wind, and the fug of pot fumes pervading Erwin’s studio certainly didn’t help. In his defense, Erwin looked particularly gorgeous, all tousled blonde hair and old V-neck shirt. In his defense, Levi privately thought he deserved a reward for successfully playing the part of wingman at ADPi, where he’d sent Petra off with his blessing with one of his more trustworthy genetics classmates.

He leaned forward and smacked a sloppy, sauce-smudged kiss to the corner of Erwin’s mouth. Much to his surprise, Erwin didn’t pull away. Much to his surprise, cutting through the fog of his intoxication, Erwin angled his face a bit more towards Levi, fingers still clamped almost painfully around Levi’s thigh. He tasted like garlic and smoke and vaguely like chocolate cake, and Levi praised Erwin’s drug dealer and the developers of flavored vodkas.

 

* * *

 

Levi woke up the next morning with a horrid crick in his neck and Erwin hovering over him worriedly with two aspirin and a glass of water, which he accepted grudgingly. The events of last night had all but disappeared from his memory, a blur of noises and voices and Petra heading off with some guy from his genetics class. And then what? Levi furrowed his eyebrows as he sat up, slowly, examining his surroundings.

Bed. Queen-sized. Not his own. He checked underneath the blankets. He still had his underwear on, and there was surely something to be said for that. His plaster Gerard Butler mask lay on the nightstand.

“Are you alright?” Erwin asked, ridiculous eyebrows drawn together in worry as he sat down on the bed next to Levi. “You were really, really smashed last night.”

Last night, last night. Levi stared at the crop of delicious-looking stubble sprouting across his jawline with consternation. And then – oh, God. He wanted to smack himself. He’d kissed Erwin, he felt sure of it now. Levi would rather have run naked across the school. Erwin probably hated him, probably was disgusted by him, probably –

“Levi?” Erwin’s voice cut through his thoughts. “You good?” To his credit, Erwin didn’t look particularly perturbed by anything. “You…remember anything that happened last night?” Ah, here it was, divine retribution, the hand of God come to smack him down.

“Unfortunately,” Levi gritted out, wishing the earth would open up into a sinkhole and swallow him whole. This was like a particularly horrendous group project gone horrifically wrong. He peeked out from underneath his bangs. Erwin was eyeing him curiously.

“You mind if we try that kiss thing again? I wasn’t in the right mind to appreciate it.”

Levi had been running through different scenarios in his mind, all involving his prompt fleeing of the country, and consequently was rather surprised. “Excuse me?” he asked, disbelieving, and Erwin backed off almost instantly.

“Sorry, sorry,” the other student replied, holding up his hands in placation. “I just…I thought…I guess I misunderstood,” Erwin finished awkwardly, making to stand up, looking like he was about to flee the country himself. Levi grabbed at his wrist, sloshing the glass of water all over the sheets in the process.

“Wait, don’t go, I’ve been waiting to kiss you for” – Levi stared off into the distance, looking into the lens of an invisible camera like a character on The Office – “nineteen chapters already.”

“Huh?” Erwin asked, thoroughly and utterly confused, but Levi had already dragged him down into another kiss.

* * *

 

Petra would wake up to a pounding headache, a fuzzy tongue, and 23 SnapChat videos from Levi, all narrated ensconced in Erwin’s bathroom. She tapped out of the app after the seventh video – all of them had been slightly altered narrations of Levi’s events of last night – and slipped out of her latest hook-up’s bed to rummage through his fridge and determine if he had any good food that he wouldn’t miss.


	20. Boiling

 

Erwin, bearing a shaving cream beard and brandishing a razor, nicked his chin and neck in several places as he groomed himself in front of his mirror. Grooming only for the sake of general appearance standards, of course. It had nothing to do with Levi. 

 Levi, who was still waiting in his living room even as he shaved. Levi who, just minutes ago, had kissed Erwin with unexpected enthusiasm. Erwin wished he could claim to have kissed back just as passionately. Instead, his lips had gone stiff and his mouth had moved in a manner uncannily reminiscent of Pacman. Surprise had gotten the better of all of his experience, much to his humiliation. He had visions of Levi sharing tales of how badly Erwin kissed to hundreds of guffawing friends. 

Erwin gulped, and felt a sudden sting on his jaw where he jerked the razor too clumsily. He already dreaded the inevitable burn of aftershave, and the army of tiny tissue squares dotting his face would look much worse than a couple days of scruff.

In his defense, he had a lot to chew on. Who could focus on shaving when they had new, confusing bouts of homosexuality to experiment with? Bisexuality? Maybe Levi knew more about that- he’d kissed Erwin much too confidently to be testing waters, and he excelled in his relationship with Petra.

A relationship that Erwin should probably address. 

After fighting with his facial hair and a good, long morning piss, Erwin left the bathroom to face Levi again. With a lousy attempt to muster up the leisurely, unfazed attitude he usually pulled off with one-night-stands, Erwin smiled politely at Levi, before starting to pick up trash from around the couch.

“So,” he began, deciding to bring up the subject as small talk, “Do you and Petra have some sort of an open-relationship thing? Or uh……?” Erwin, who didn’t outright want to mention infidelity, let Levi assume the alternative.

Levi gawped at Erwin, knotting his hands together to avoid the near irresistible urge to pluck off the little squares of tissue that dotted his jaw. Petra? What did Petra have to do with any of this? he wondered to himself. Oh. Erwin had probably heard him talking to his SnapChat in the bathroom. Understandable, really – he’d sent off quite a few videos to Petra, but he refused to take blame for the fact that the app only allowed 10 seconds to film oneself with. His excitement could not possibly be contained within that time frame.

But Erwin had said something else, too. Something about an open relationship? What was that about? Levi, despite his unquenchable thirst, was about as monogamous as your average penguin, and the thought of sharing Erwin with anyone had him seeing red. 

“Petra and I aren’t dating,” he replied carefully. They weren’t. They couldn’t be. Why, he’d sent her off with one of his classmates just the night before, someone she clearly was not happy about if her lack of response to his opened SnapChats was any indication. If they were dating, that was certainly news to him. “We’re just really, really, really good friends.” Three reallys seemed to be adequate, and considering his previous history of excesses, Levi was quite proud of his self-restraint.

Erwin’s first thought should have been,  _Thank god. Full speed ahead with Plan Get Petra’s Ass. Sh _e was cut _e _enough, c _ertainly._____  But instead, something about the availability of Levi’s perfectly perky booty took priority. A perky booty that, apparently, he spent a lot more time observing last night than he remembered. He never paid that much attention before, had he? 

He zoned out on an ancient, dusty potato chip he’d found underneath the couch. Was Levi the reason he couldn’t get it up? Was Levi his only chance at ever getting it up again?  His eyes stared mournfully into the wide, barbeque-seasoned depths of ancient potato chip resting in his hand, before placing it into his mouth and- oh God, what had he done? 

Horrified, Erwin prayed Levi hadn’t caught him, while spitting out the disgusting thing into an old receipt. He tackled the mess around his studio with renewed fervor, slam-dunking crumpled receipts and half-eaten pizza crusts into the garbage.

Under normal circumstances, witnessing someone rummage around under their couch and pull out a potato chip would have been a deal-breaker. Watching said person pop said chip into their mouth would most definitely have sent Levi running for the hills. But Erwin was not a normal person, and these were not normal circumstances. Levi watched the other student futz about his studio while he tried to sort out his thoughts; Erwin was clearing up old receipts and leftover pizza crusts that looked just old enough to be remnants of another civilization entirely, and normally this really would have gotten Levi raring to go – there was just something about trim men and tidying that really set his blood boiling.

But, despite this, Levi was quite on edge, and even his dick was on its best behavior, lying all placid and good-tempered in his pants. He couldn’t find the right word to categorize what had just transpired. A one-night stand? But no, no, that wasn’t it; there was no drunken fumbling with a condom wrapper, no horrified anonymity, and no tiptoeing out of Erwin’s apartment at the crack of dawn with a vague expression of shame after first pilfering the fridge for any tasty goods. 

And then there had been that whole confusion with Petra. The idea was laughable, really. He’d have to tell her when he managed to find a way out of the horrible awkwardness that had settled over the studio. But, ah, first things first, he sighed to himself, gnawing at his lower lip and wondering how to break the silence. With a dread in the pit of his stomach that only rivaled the feeling of opening one’s folded exam to check the grade, he blurted out, “Do you need help cleaning?”

The sound of Levi’s voice startled Erwin, and it took a considerable amount of cognitive reassembling to reply at all. “Uhhh……” 

Normally, he hated letting other people help him clean. The mess on its own had accumulated to levels gut-churning to all but the laziest of young adult bachelors. That didn’t even take into account the hidden stashes of magazines, used tissues, and toenail clippings Levi would likely find. If Erwin’s kissing hadn’t obliterated his chances of sexual exploration with Levi, then crevices of his studio would result in getting blocked on all social media. 

“You know, the mess can wait,” he ultimately decided. It had already waited for months, after all. “Why don’t we go out to breakfast, instead? My treat.” Erwin grinned amiably at Levi. His offer sounded very close to a date, but the offer of free food would surely halt any protests before they began.

If there was anything that Levi was a massive slut for, besides tall blonde men and Captain Morgan, it was the promise of free breakfasts. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” according to some famous, possibly long-dead person, but clearly said famous, long-dead person clearly had never had someone like Erwin Smith in their lives.

And while Erwin’s proposal had sounded like – well, exactly that – Levi had weighed it against his recent history of abject thirst and decided that perhaps this might even out the scales a bit. That, and free waffles.  His phone vibrated with Petra’s responses, alternated with Petra’s pleas for help – apparently his classmate had woken up and was now attempting to coerce her into having brunch with him. 

But Levi had bigger things to worry about at the present moment, namely, such as how to calm the frantic beating of his heart. Perhaps he was coming down with something, he thought as a flush swept across his face under Erwin’s hopeful expression. Surely there was some sort of medical explanation for why he was acting this way. It felt sickeningly like the same sort of infatuation he’d harbored for Mike, and Levi absolutely, completely, thoroughly was not ready for that sort of single-minded commitment again. 

His stomach growled, reminding him that he hadn’t had anything solid in the past twelve hours. Shoving aside the worrisome thoughts and saving the emotional confrontation with himself for later, Levi stood up and made his way to the door, his footsteps crinkling and crunching across the floor. 

“I would like to go to Waffle House,” he informed Erwin. Surely these silly feelings could be weighted down with a few thick, hot Belgian waffles. Levi made a mental note to stop describing things using adjectives that might also apply to Erwin’s dick, which he was now beginning to sorely regret not seeing last night while he’d had the chance. Perhaps it was better that he hadn’t, he mused to himself, pushing open the door. He might have been blinded by its beauty, and that would truly have been a shame. 

Erwin, who prided himself on the gigantic tower of thick, hot Belgium waffles he could stuff into this mouth in one sitting, followed Levi without an argument. He picked up a hoodie from off the ground, pulled it on, and went out the door. Getting out of the house after stagnating in his studio would do him a lot of good.

* * *

 

 

The atmosphere of the Waffle House was thick with the scent of rich buttermilk syrup and clusters of students fighting off hangovers with calories. In one corner, Erwin spotted a brunette with striking green eyes and another guy bearing a spiky mass of bleached hair over a dark undercut. They goggled at each other, stole food off of each other’s plates, and Erwin would bet a large sum of money that they fucked on a regular basis. With a glance down toward Levi, Erwin wondered if they looked like a couple at all.

He’d never really seen a lot of gay guys on campus… at least, he didn’t think he did? How many of them weaved, unseen and unheard, through classes, cafes, and parties? Had kissing Levi just thrown him through a proverbial Platform 9 and ¾, and into a new world full of magic and rainbow parades and wand-touching? Erwin didn’t think he could handle all of that at once.

Maybe Levi could ‘tutor’ him? He made a fine Microeconomics tutor. Sexuality was just another subject. Erwin shouldn’t overthink this. Was frantically trying not to overthink this. The only thing stopping him from melting into a puddle of pure confusion was the promise of breakfast.

As soon as they settled into a table, and the waiter left to bring Erwin coffee, he quietly asked Levi, “So….. you’re….. gay, right?” 

Levi snorted into his freshly squeezed orange juice. Freshly squeezed, my ass, he thought to himself. It was definitely from concentrate, he could even see the waiters pouring the purported “freshly squeezed” juice from a Minute Maid carton in blatant sight of their booth, but if Erwin was paying, Levi would have no issue with the false advertising.

“I am indeed a flaming homosexual,” he affirmed, smirking across the table. Now that he and Erwin were ensconced firmly in the booth, Levi was thoroughly unworried about Erwin fleeing the scene. If Erwin even so much as attempted to go to the restroom without leaving some valuable form of collateral, Levi was not above stabbing him in the thigh with a fork for the free waffles he was promised. He was vicious when it came to defending his breakfast rights, as Petra would have been able to attest to. 

Turning his head to work out a crick in his neck, Levi spotted Eren and his delinquent savage of a boyfriend in a corner of the Waffle House. Eren, who was in the middle of dabbing whipped cream on Jean’s nose, froze instantly upon meeting Levi’s eyes. Levi glared at the freshman. This was supposed to be his moment, with his – boyfriend? what were they exactly? The not one-night one-night stand? – in his favorite breakfast spot, and he put enough venom in his glare to fell a bull elephant. Eren cowered in his seat.

“I’ve known for a while,” Levi finished, smiling almost saccharine sweet as he turned back to Erwin, satisfied that he’d put the fear of God into his mess of an apartment mate. “But I guess I could see how you might think Petra and I are a thing.”

“I got confused by that,” Erwin admitted, after a moment of hesitation. A lot of things confused him that morning. Even his blurry reflection in Levi’s glass of orange juice looked like a hot mess, with bangs hanging across his forehead, a stubborn cowlick and several leftover tissue squares on his jaw. He ran a hand through his hair in a futile attempt to straighten it out.

Across the table, Levi looked just as rough. In fact, he looked downright malicious and smug, on a cartoon villain level—and he pulled it off damn well. It worked better for Erwin than an hour of lesbian porn had, anyway. Wincing, Erwin pressed his lips into a long, tight line, before sputtering out, “I think I might be—“ and then promptly clamping his mouth shut when he saw their waiter approaching again with a pot of coffee.

After ordering the Endless Stack of Belgium Waffles with Sausage and Eggs (scrambled), Erwin let the waiter leave him red-faced and pouring two little plastic packages of hazelnut creamer into his coffee. He didn’t risk looking up and meeting Levi’s eyes yet.

Earlier in the morning, Erwin had asked Levi to kiss him again. He could confess his bicurious feelings to him. What difference was there? Erwin inhaled deeply, and stirred his coffee. “I was going to tell you that I’ve been considering the possibility that I might be attracted to some men,” he informed Levi, keeping his tone composed.

Levi took a gleeful sip of his orange juice, mulling the tart-sweet flavor around in his mouth as he considered Erwin’s statement. It was only through a great show of restraint, and the fact that somehow he’d managed to hook the hem of one of the legs of his jeans on the booth seat that kept Levi from jumping out of his seat with joy. If he was being well and truly honest with himself, it was an odd thing, to be in this position. Levi was well versed in the role of the abjectly longing lover, watching from afar while his romantic interest went around and cavorted with every last one of the other cast members (see: Mike), and the neatly ordered pages of the script he’d practiced so many times went fluttering into the air.

Careful now, he cautioned to himself even as he slowly shredded the paper napkin into oblivion beneath the table. It wouldn’t do to scare Erwin off.

“Oh?” he asked after a moment of careful consideration during which he watched with mild disgust as Eren, across the restaurant, stuffed an entire waffle quadrant into his mouth. Really, some people had absolutely no dignity, he scoffed to himself even as he turned back and admired the little snowy field of toilet paper squares littering Erwin’s jaw. “And what makes you think that? Other than the fact that we – ah – our mouths hit each other more than once.”

A lonely, aforementioned toilet-paper square fell off of Erwin’s chin, to drift like leftover confetti onto his crotch. Erwin glanced down at his dick, lamenting its recent indecisiveness. Why did he think he might be attracted to guys? Because I flop around when I used to get stiff, and I stiff up where I used to stay floppy, he thought, with an anguished sigh. Had he popped a chubby during the course of the night Levi stayed with him? Perhaps, but that is a story for another time, and Erwin certainly wasn’t quite on clear terms with his recent self revelations yet. 

He nearly told Levi that, but settled with, “Well… I look at some guys, and I think they’re hot, and I ask them to kiss me.” Really, was there much more to it? What did Levi expect to hear? That he’d made cameos in Erwin’s latest fantasies, and had an offer for a leading role? That he had the chance to become an A-list celebrity in the Hollywood of Erwin’s sexual life? 

In the other booth, he watched Jean Kirstein prove that he could stuff a whole half of a waffle into his mouth, mountain of whipped cream and all, and Erwin wondered if he’d have to learn how to give a blowjob. He took a long, thoughtful sip of coffee.

“Some guys?” Levi asked, absentmindedly gnawing on his straw. Well, that was as promising a start as any. He watched through the little window to the kitchen, where the chef was bent over the cooktop, frying a pile of hash browns that Levi sorely hoped were his. His stomach seemed to be growling to the tune of a Fall Out Boy song. Their waitress scooped up a few plates from the counter, and began heading towards their booth, and Levi’s eyes brightened as he watched the promised breakfast come closer and closer.

Then the implications of Erwin’s statement sunk in. 

“Some guys?!” he all but squawked, as the waitress set down the plates of waffles, sausage, egg, and hashbrown down on the table between them. Levi was far too busy running those two words through his mind to narrow his eyes viciously at the waitress, whose uniform top was unbuttoned two buttons past reasonable. What other guys did Erwin want to kiss him? Levi wondered, his grip on his silverware white-knuckled. He’d defend Erwin until his dying breath, and, as if to start readying himself for the inevitable battles that would undoubtedly be fought for the right to Erwin’s hand, Levi began shoveling hashbrowns into his mouth. He was already in the twelfth percentile for height and weight, and for someone as beautiful as Erwin, he was sure the competition would be fierce.

Levi reacted much more negatively to Erwin’s confession than Erwin had expected. Did he say something wrong? Worried, Erwin mulled over how to respond, but the waiter saved him from having to come up with anything.

He eyed the approaching mounds of food with a glow spreading across his face. Erwin couldn’t process many of the events of the past twenty-four hours, but scrambled eggs were blessedly simple to understand. No one had ever had an identity crisis over discovering they liked sausage as well as bacon. Levi looked even more excited over the food, and somewhat appeased by rapid hashbrown consumption.

“Yeah, some guys,” he half-heartedly repeated, before adding on, “including you,” in an attempt to appease Levi. Hoping that the hashbrowns would smooth any reason Levi had to be upset with him, Erwin claimed his own emotional sanctuary in a cathedral of fluffy eggs and maple syrup.

Levi was about to lose his mind. Leave it to a business major to answer the question without answering anything at all, he thought angrily to himself as he demolished half a stack of waffles with a rapidity that would have put him in good standing with former Nathan’s Hot Dogs Contest Champions. There was nothing for it, Levi supposed to himself. He’d just have to become the most attractive guy on the market, and wipe out all of the surrounding competition with his beauty; he was quite sure the chemistry labs didn’t have enough hydrofluoric acid to dissolve all the bodies of Erwin’s potential suitors, the shadows of whom Levi was sure were already beating paths down to Erwin’s doorstep. He made a private mental note to himself to start incorporating vegetables into his diet, even dreaded cauliflower, and he swore to himself that he would start sleeping more regularly and more often. As much as he applauded himself on his designer eye bags, they really would have to go if he wanted even a fighting chance with Erwin.

Then again, Levi mused to himself, stuffing a spoonful of eggs into his mouth, Erwin had asked him for that kiss. And Erwin _had_ offered to treat him to breakfast. At Waffle House, no less, which was practically the height of upscale dining in the little college neighborhood. And he’d made it a point to single Levi out with the whole “other guys” spiel.

If he was being fair and tallying correctly, Levi figured that maybe he was about two points up. But his mind, worrisome by nature, convinced him that he was thoroughly mistaken about the whole thing, convinced him that it was all a huge fluke, that perhaps he was in a coma or something of the sort and everything, from the whipped cream on his Belgian waffle to Erwin’s eyebrows was a product of his deluded imagination and whatever cocktail of drugs he was hopped up on. Had Petra been there, she would have sighed and told Levi to please stop having an existential crisis over the maple syrup, he was making a scene and this was the third time this week, did he want to get banned from the Waffle House? Unfortunately, Levi’s voice of reason had been left behind in Erwin’s apartment, probably stagnating with his plaster Gerard Butler mask on Erwin’s nightstand, and Levi took another determined bite of waffle as he weighed the pros and cons of going back to Erwin’s apartment to retrieve his much-favored Halloween costume.

_Pro: He’d get to be the Phantom of the Opera for another ten years._

_Con: He’d have to go back to the scene of the crime, such as it were._

_Pro: By returning to the scene of the crime, Erwin might realize his true feelings, confess his undying love for Levi and Levi alone before swooping him off into his Toyota and driving off into the sunset._

_Con: Love? Where had that come from??_

Not even a mouthful of greasy sausage managed to put Erwin at ease. Across the table, Levi still looked infuriated as he downed truly awe-inspiring amounts of food. Erwin didn’t think he’d ever observed any man eat quite so much in one sitting—not even Mike, who regularly consumed entire buckets of KFC by himself. In fact, Levi impressed Erwin so much that he discreetly transferred some of his own waffles to Levi’s plate just to watch a master in action. If Erwin couldn’t have seen Levi’s glares crisping the bacon into sooty lumps, he may have considered asking him for the secrets to his success.

As things stood, Erwin wondered if Levi would vanish out of his life as soon as Erwin paid for breakfast. He must have broken some secret rule that gay people followed, or else Levi could remember how he kissed. Maybe Erwin ruined his own chances with a sick combination of the two? After all, a put-together and experienced guy like Levi could do better than a shambling business major who couldn’t even write a resume.

And, on the possibility that Erwin didn’t obliterate his chances with Levi…. where did he go from here?

Generally speaking, Erwin didn’t take things slowly. Not since Marie, anyway. Had Erwin’s situation with Levi resembled his conquests of late, Erwin would have already gotten his dick wet, used breakfast to bury guilt instead of confusion, and moved on.

He supposed he could still do that. Erwin imagined a quick fumble in the dark with Levi, all trial and error and body fluids. He imagined finding other men, going to gay clubs, and trying out all sorts of new likeable things. Erwin picked up bedroom tricks quickly. In a year, he could sleep with just as many men as he had women. He could do that.

But, then again, he’d spent much of his recent life in regret and denying a drinking problem. Maybe Levi, put-together and experienced, was just what Erwin needed. A stable, smart and clean boyfriend who filled his resume with red marks. 

“Look,” Erwin began, averting his eyes again. “I don’t know what I said wrong… but I don’t know what I’m doing here. Honestly, I can’t even remember the last time I took a girl on a date, so if this is supposed to be…. more than mouths hitting each other and breakfast….. you’re going to have to help me out here.”

Levi choked on a sausage at the word “date.” He’d have to give himself a stern talking to later, he thought amidst violent bouts of coughing that had his ribs aching. He had a better gag reflex than that, certainly. 

“This is a date?” he asked once he’d recovered to make a sufficient reply. This was news to him. He’d thought it was exactly that, mouths hitting each other and breakfast, and after cleaning out the Waffle House’s morning supply of potatoes, he’d been more than ready to flee back to his apartment and crawl under the covers of his bed, sobbing dramatically into his pillowcase at what could have been. 

But a date? That sounded vaguely serious.

He could have slapped himself. Well, hell, if Erwin was offering him first dibs from all the other suitors who were beating a path down his door, Levi wouldn’t sniff at it, and he hastened to make amends.

He leaned over the table in much the same way the waitress had leaned flirtatiously over it earlier, batting his eyelashes at Erwin, a technique he’d seen in quite a few soap operas. 

“Oh, but of course it’s a date!” he remedied, quickly, grinning nearly manically, fingers itching to somehow surreptitiously sneak a SnapChat video of it to send to Petra, and, while he was at it, the entire school through the university’s campus story as well (no worries there, Eren had his phone out and was blatantly filming Levi’s transgressions). “But ah, I’m not that well-versed in the whole dating process either, so just think of it like a learning experience!” Here, Levi gnawed on his lower lip in an attempt to be the picture of innocence, but, as it was, Levi was also not that well-versed in the subtle arts of seduction, and so ended up looking more like an overly excited gerbil with a carrot stick.

Erwin stared at Levi, taking in everything. This included Levi’s eyelashes fluttering so hard that Erwin almost wondered if Levi wanted to signal SOS in morse code blinking to someone else in the restaurant (maybe the brunette he kept making eye-contact with?) This also included Levi rapidly shredding his own lip. Had mountains of hashbrowns gotten to him and made him feel ill? 

When the waitress returned, Erwin briefly checked the total, before handing her a couple of bills and telling her to keep the change as a tip, and not to worry about returning a receipt. This worried her, as she had intended on returning with her phone number scrawled across his receipt, “ for the short one with the designer eyebags ” Erwin had turned unattractive when some of his toilet-paper beard fell into his coffee and he drank it without noticing 

Downing the rest of the inadvertently tainted coffee, Erwin stood up, and then turned to Levi at the table. With all of the florescent bulbs behind him, lighting up his hair into a halo of bedhead, Erwin looked down at Levi and said, “Ah, you’ve got something on your face.” He reached down, and swiped a dab of bacon grease off of Levi’s cheek with his thumb before popping it into his mouth. Erwin offered his other hand to help Levi out of the booth.

* * *

 

Levi was fit to burst. He couldn’t wait to tell Petra about his unexpected date with Erwin, though he’d probably edit out the part where he’d nearly swooned when Erwin had held out his hand to help Levi out of the booth. And people said chivalry was dead! Ha! Levi scoffed at them as he put his hand into Erwin’s, trying not to clutch too hard at Erwin’s fingers. It wouldn’t do to get too needy, not this early in the game. 

No. What Levi needed to do was play it calm, play up the cool, collected image he’d worked so hard over the years to cultivate. Maybe play a bit hard to get? Keep Erwin interested?

But then again, he’d also all but died when Erwin had wiped an errant spot of grease off his cheek before popping his thumb in his mouth. It was like a romcom movie, with Erwin as the rugged handsome, bedheaded male lead, and Levi as the other dashing male lead.

Walking past Eren, Jean, and the waitress, all three of whom were gaping in astonishment at him, Levi sauntered away triumphantly, Erwin’s hand in a near death grip as he pushed out the double doors of the restaurant and spilled out into the bright sunlight of late morning. He took a deep breath. The air smelled like waffles, hot asphalt, and the bright smell of victory. 

* * *

Eren gawked at Jean across the table. Jean was in a similar state of disbelief.

“Levi’s got a boyfriend,” Eren all but shrieked at the same time Jean announced, “That was one fine piece of ass.” He wagged his eyebrows for extra effect.

Eren gasped in horror and delivered a vicious kick to Jean’s shin under the table, one that bruise in lovely shades of blue and purple and allow him to take full advantage of the campus golf carts for the next two weeks. Eren would apologize dutifully and bring him Ziploc bags of ice which he pilfered from the communal ice trays and consequently forgot to refill, and managed to ignore the sternly worded emails and Post-it notes Levi stuck to his door. This latest piece of news preoccupied his mind more than any physics lecture ever had.


	21. Matches

For two weeks, Erwin had experimentally dated Levi Ackerman.

So far he’d enjoyed the experience. Erwin didn’t know what he’d call them- partners? Mutually interested parties? Boyfriends? Just really good friends ? Granted, they hadn’t really done much yet, apart from splitting sticks of gum and occasionally making out, but it gave Erwin a much needed opportunity to prove that he could kiss without conjuring up images of slugs and snails or horses chewing up hay. 

It also gave him the opportunity to spend spring break in the company of someone other than lonely bottles of Kraken Spiced Rum and beach parties full of strangers in Mexico or Italy. After casual prying, Erwin had discovered that Levi had no plans yet. Levi also didn’t have a passport, unfortunately, which meant they had to stay in the country…. but Erwin found a nice, long domestic cruise to settle on that’d take them to Honolulu and back. He’d make sure Levi had a passport for next time. 

Waiting eagerly with all the ticket confirmations clutched in his hand, he waited outside of Levi’s last class to surprise him. He shouldn’t be so excited over something small like a cruise… but he hadn’t found the chance to spend time with someone like this since Marie. And, with warmer weather, Erwin might get a chance to see more of Levi’s precious two teacups of ass, unmasked from baggy sweaters and long coats. These days, little Erwin got neglected so much that it got excited over a glimpse of Levi’s ankles.

* * *

Since they’d abruptly and near violently become a “thing,” Levi had been in a constant state of frothing adoration. If it were possible, his thirst had gotten even worse, as both Petra and Mikasa could attest to from their weekly taco nights. The boy had it bad, and Petra vaguely wondered if she should start putting aside money for a nice outfit to wear to Levi’s impending wedding. She doubted Levi would be too pleased with the only “nice” outfit she had, a silver spangled number that she’d worn to Gamma Phi and which, he had informed her snootily in the way only a gay best friend could, made her thighs look fat.

In fact, everyone except for Levi knew Levi was madly, furiously in love with Erwin. And, if not love, at least something much more than desperate lust. As far as Petra knew, and she knew quite more about Levi’s sexual habits than she had ever wanted to know, the two of them hadn’t yet boinked, as Levi so casually referred to it. 

Levi spilled out of the genetics classroom with relief, ready to enjoy a well-deserved spring break, when he caught sight of Erwin waiting for him outside his lecture hall. This small act in itself was enough to make him swoon, knocking over a rack of bicycles in the process, but he ignored the angry glares and irritated snarky comments as he made his way towards Erwin.

* * *

As the bicycles toppled over, Erwin gaped in disbelief, before breaking down in a fit of chuckles. Outside of Vines or Youtube videos, he didn’t think he’d seen someone cause so much rapid damage in at least two months. By the time Levi stood in front of him, he still had a few giggles left in him.

“Did you just--?” he asked, snickering, pointing his free hand toward the chaos around the bike rack, before dismissing his question with a wave of the papers in his other hand. “Never mind. You know how you didn’t have any plans for spring break? You do now. We’re on a tight schedule and we’ve got to get to your place to pack if we want to make the flight to Seattle on time.” 

Erwin’s eyes twinkled as he looked down toward Levi. The perfect, cotton-candy dusting of pink across Levi’s cheeks coupled with the impending surprise formed a good mood that even the memory of his last ethics assignment could not crush.

* * *

Per Levi's requests, Eren and Jean had started saving the more explicit activities for the confines of Eren's bedroom. However, for activities such as this, where they were both adequately clothed (see, a PG-13 rating), they had moved those to the couch, primarily because of Jean's complaints that Eren's twin-sized mattress was really just too small and he felt like he was going to throw out his back at any moment. The rating was swiftly starting to head more towards something of the NC-17 persuasion, and Jean's hands were fiddling with the zip of Eren's jeans when the apartment door swung violently open, cracking against the wall and sending down a tiny shower of plaster raining down to scatter on their heads. 

Jean craned his neck to look around Eren's forearm to find Levi marching towards them like an avenging angel come to cast hellfire on their sinful ways, and he froze, nearly kneeing Eren in the balls as he scrabbled to tug his sweatshirt down and sit up like some model of propriety. 

Erwin followed close behind Levi, and Jean relaxed, marginally. If Levi's boyfriend was here, certainly Levi wouldn't kill them off quite yet for defiling the couch. 

* * *

 

Seattle? Goodness gracious, Erwin had really pulled out all the stops, Levi thought to himself as he huffed and puffed and sped walked across campus to his apartment with Erwin in tow. Gosh, he’d really have to start working out, he scolded himself; by the time Erwin even got close to divesting him of something as simple as his T-shirt, Levi planned to be thoroughly ripped. A difficult prospect to think about, especially with Levi’s fondness for weekly taco nights and pints of Ben and Jerry’s.

Banging into his apartment, Levi breezed past Eren and Jean, who froze abruptly in the middle of their illicit activities, all but falling off the couch. Levi fully expected a newly washed and vacuumed sofa to be waiting in the communal living area when he returned from wherever Erwin was spiriting him off to. Flouncing into his room, Levi tugged out a duffel bag that had seen better days from beneath his bed and started stacking neat piles of clothes into it. He agonized over what underwear to bring. The nice ones his mother had given him for his twentieth birthday, the black silk ones that complemented his skin tone quite nicely? Would Erwin even care what underwear he brought? Would Levi even get comfortable enough with Erwin to justify allowing him to see him in his underwear? Despite his abject thirst, the thought of Erwin coming face to face with Levi Jr. with only a thin film of silk between them was a terrifying prospect. The same went for Russell. Though he’d spent many lonely nights imagining Erwin’s package, which he was sure was rather sizable, Levi was still trying to build up the mental stamina to not just faint rapturously on the spot when presented with the real deal.

Whatever. He tossed clothes haphazardly into the bag, along with his phone charger and his wallet and some ‘light’ reading for the flight – he didn’t trust the SkyMall magazines they usually stuffed into the back of airplane seats.

“Do I need to bring anything else, or is this good?” he asked Erwin over his shoulder.

* * *

Two young people having a go at it on the couch normally wouldn’t stick with Erwin; he’d walked in on worse countless times at parties. But, for some ungodly reason, the image of Jean and Eren engraved itself onto his thoughts even while he stood in Levi’s doorframe.

Only it wasn’t really Jean and Eren in his thoughts. He pictured himself, trapping Levi down against those cushions, with hips grinding slowly and fingers clutching at flesh and cushions. He imagined Levi’s face below him, messy bangs across his forehead and half-lidded eyes, mouth fallen open into a moan and he really shouldn’t imagine any more of this.

Erwin, now flushed as red as his fantasy Levi, shifted strategically, praying his long coat hid as much as he hoped.

“-or is this good?” Levi finished asking, and Erwin shook his head. He hadn’t even paid attention to what Levi packed. “Oh, um…. Yeah. Probably. Bring a swimsuit and sunglasses, though. And sunscreen.” Levi looked like the type to sizzle under too much sun.

* * *

A swimsuit? Sunglasses? Levi’s mind was suddenly flooded with images of Sports Illustrated magazines, conveniently mentally edited so that the glossy covers displayed Erwin, limbs redolent and golden with tanning oil, in a tight little red Speedo. The jingle from that one Yoplait commercial played through his head – an itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka dot bikini – and he sternly reprimanded Levi, Jr. for twitching in mild interest. Now was not the time.

Rummaging through his drawers, Levi unearthed a pair of green swim trunks that he’d brought from home in the hopes of maybe making it to the school swimming pools one day – part of his tuition was going towards the continued upkeep of the athletic center, after all! – but one look at the absolutely filthy locker rooms and shower stalls, all but one growing mold and mildew in the corners, had Levi bailing out of that corner of campus as quickly as his legs could take him. Tossing these into his bag and propping a pair of aviators on his head, Levi contemplated the bottle of sunscreen he kept in a desk drawer, once again, purchased in the hopes that maybe one day he would be courageous enough to brave the ecosystem of the athletic center’s locker rooms. It was certainly bigger than the requisite three ounces airlines usually allowed, but he would roast without generous application. That was the last thing he needed, really, for Erwin to see him doing his best interpretation of a lobster.

But time was ticking away, and Erwin had stressed the importance of hurrying. Without further ado, Levi popped the tube of sunscreen into his bag and prayed to whatever divine beings existed that they wouldn’t get held up by the TSA. He’d heard nightmare stories about that particular government agency, from people who had launched social media accounts specifically to complain about their experiences, most of which seemed to involve being subjected to a pat down over something as mundane as a tiny box of raisins.

* * *

With all of Levi’s things packed, Erwin whisked him away, offering to carry his suitcase for the convenience of something to hide his own boner. To his relief, during the whole trip to the airport, his imagination never wandered off as badly as it had with the couch, and he even managed to get sneaky and rest his hand on Levi’s thigh.

* * *

"You think they're gone, now?" Jean asked, absentmindedly ambling over to the window and staring out long after Erwin and Levi had already departed from the apartment in some whirlwind fling that would have any romantic comedy couple quivering in shame. "It looks like they're going to be gone for all of spring break." 

Jean turned back to waggle his eyebrows at Eren, who was, much to his surprise, moping on the couch. 

"Hey, babe?" he asked, coming back to sit down next to Eren and sling an arm around his shoulders. "What's wrong?" 

"We're not doing anything for spring break, are we?" Eren's tone was flat, almost disappointed, and Jean could have winced at the low key sadness in his voice. "Not going anywhere or doing anything special like that?" 

Jean was particularly susceptible to guilt trips, something which Eren had started to pick up on and resolved to exploit relentlessly. If he was being well and truly honest with himself, Eren had no particular qualms about staying home and watching Netflix and occasionally 'chilling,' but Jean didn't need to know that. 

"Tell you what," Jean murmured, nuzzling kisses into Eren's neck. "Why don't we stay local for break? Maybe go to Disneyland?" 

It was more than Eren had expected, and he squealed with glee and allowed Jean to pin him to the cushions again. 

* * *

 

Armin, who had overheard the entire conversation, took a few more blackmail photos of the couch being used for strictly prohibited purposes, and would later that night pin a list of Disney merchandise he wished to purchase to Eren's bedroom door.

 

 


	22. Roast

“I’m sorry it’s just business class,” Erwin apologized, settling into his seat. “I figured I’d save a little money though. Maybe we’ll take first class another time?” He wondered, too, if one day they’d join the Mile High Club together, but banished the idea before it could settle in his head and turn into another couch incident.

God, what was wrong with him today? If he’d known in advance that Russell would want to play on a day where he trapped himself with Levi during a two-hour flight (and then booked them a hotel room with a single king-sized bed…… and a subsequent cruise with similar lodgings), maybe he would have figured out different plans for spring break. The idea of several girls in bikinis, spreading sunscreen across Levi’s back, and piña coladas looked good on paper, but in practice might lead to many regrets.

Erwin took a deep breath. If he didn’t want to thoroughly embarrass himself this trip, he’d have to learn to focus on other small talk and conversations. Getting time to just talk to Levi, without any other distractions, would be nice. And once they got to the hotel, he could sneak into the bathroom to jerk off in record time, and take a cold shower. 

For a sure-to-work, emergency hot-dog-softening experience, he could even check his phone once they landed. Erwin would certainly find no less than sixteen texts from his mother about how he should have gone on vacation with his family. He could only imagine her reaction if she ever found out he spent it with another man. That conversation Erwin didn’t think he’d ever be ready for.

* * *

 

Levi insisted on sitting next to the window. And all but shrieking when the plane began to taxi down the runway, clinging to Erwin’s hand with a death grip. It gave him the perfect excuse to, after all. He was flattered that Erwin had planned out a vacation for the two of them, and was not at all bothered about the business or first class ordeal. He’d just add this to his Snap story with the caption “Me and the bae’s first honeymoon.” Call him optimistic, but Levi found himself spending more and more time fawning over Erwin’s awkward texts and little gestures rather than waxing poetic over the size of his dick or the suppleness of his ass. (See: large and firm enough to bounce quarters off of).

He had absolutely no idea what Erwin had planned out for spring break, but he had a few ideas. The fact that Erwin had told him to pack swimming trunks and sunscreen – which, by some miracle (or, rather, by the fact that Erwin looked like the most average, well-adjusted, American college student ever) had passed through the TSA’s surveillance, had Levi thinking about Erwin in swimming trunks, Erwin in Speedos, etcetera. All the mental images he’d struggled to repress earlier while he was packing now flooded back in full force, and he nearly spilt his free cup of orange juice all over himself in his near state of frothing. The clouds skimmed by outside the window, and Levi was able to drive away images of a near naked Erwin glistening with tanning oil by trying to make out shapes in the fluff. That one looked like an elephant, that one a peanut, that one looked … oh dear, that one looked rather like a dick, now didn’t it, and he took another sip of orange juice, which did absolutely nothing to quench his abject thirst.

He couldn’t wait to text Petra about this. She’d be green with envy, but both she and Levi’s mother had viewed his Snap story – he’d checked before the plane had taken off – and both had given him their warm regards and wishes to have fun.

Or, more accurately, Petra had called him a cocksucker of the tenth degree, but he got the sentiment behind it anyway.

* * *

 

Erwin never quite let go of Levi’s hand after the plane took off, taking full advantage of Levi’s fear. He made a mental note to take Levi to go see horror movies and go through haunted houses when October came around. The idea of Levi clinging to Erwin’s arm koala-bear style seemed even nicer than the sensation of Levi’s tiny, feather-soft hand nestled into Erwin’s much bigger palm—which Erwin could proudly admit wasn’t sweaty, not even one bit.

The way Levi furiously texted and took pictures with his phone (whenever possible) charmed Erwin as well. Without questions, he let Levi take selfies with him and post them on Snapchat, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and whatever social media Levi was into. Erwin himself rarely posted anything these days. He checked Facebook, of course, and used the messenger app frequently. He checked Snapchat and Vine and all of his other apps too, though he’d let Tinder quietly collect embarrassing hordes of little red notifications in a dark, dusty corner of his phone.

He wondered if it bothered Levi that he never chatted about them as a couple or made quite as big of a fuss. In fact, Erwin had yet to post anything about their relationship. It wasn’t out of a lack of affection, or because Erwin wanted to sneak around. But, even if Erwin considered Levi a really nice catch (cute, successful, and willing to deal with Erwin’s convoluted mess of life), he hadn’t quite mustered the courage really tell everyone he’d started dating a guy. Some of his friends probably knew, in fact, Mike had an uncanny sense for just this sort of thing. And Erwin didn’t stop Levi from telling everyone, in excessive detail, about the ins-and-outs of their relationship. Erwin just…. vaguely dreaded the day Levi tried to make them Facebook-official, or something more public.

Erwin sighed and gave Levi’s hand a squeeze, before deciding to break the news about the trip to him. “So,” he began, “We’re going to be staying the night in Seattle, and in the morning we’re going on a cruise. We’re going to Hawaii. I hope… I hope you like that? I kinda wanted to get away from all the cold weather.”

* * *

 

Hawaii? Levi’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head. His only knowledge about the state came from that famed Disney movie Lilo and Stitch, and glossy travel brochures that always had white beaches and gently waving palm trees on their covers. Well, slap his ass and call him a coconut, because Levi was sure this was practically the honeymoon. He’d gather his grandchildren onto his knee when he was a crotchety sixty-four, and tell them all about the time their grandfather had wooed him with business class tickets and a cruise across the ocean. Quite romantic, really.

That wasn’t to say Levi wasn’t vaguely bothered by it. The trip must have cost Erwin hundreds, if not thousands, and there was no way Levi would be able to repay that any time soon, no matter how many hours he worked at the research lab sexing fruit flies. Unless Erwin was low key offering to be a sugar daddy. Levi pondered this prospect as the plane started its descent into Seattle. He did have some student loans amassed that it would be nice to pay off. 

But Levi was only twenty, a ripe twenty at that, and was vaguely uncomfortable with becoming a kept man, as it was. Then again, studying Erwin’s profile in the gloomy light over Seattle, Levi thought that perhaps the whole sugar daddy thing might not be so bad. Sugar boyfriends? That sounded slightly better. Erwin was only a few months older than he was, after all, one fact among many about Erwin’s personal information that Levi had memorized after many nights staring at Erwin’s Facebook page.

He had looked at it so frequently that he’d be able to tell anyone exactly where Erwin Smith was on any given night, dating from the present to early 2010. There were some limits to the extent of his memory, after all. 

“I would love that!” Levi said with a cheerful grin as he turned to Erwin, trying not to clutch too hard as the plane bounced along the tarmac in a rather rough landing. Oh, gosh, he’d really have to start watching his language. Using the L word was perhaps too much for his fragile sensibilities.

* * *

 

When Levi grinned, something pleasant bubbled up in Erwin’s chest- a feeling akin to that time during freshman year when he got a 92% on his history final. Unlike his history final, however, Erwin had spent over an hour preparing for this trip, and if he could have kept the look on Levi’s face on a piece of paper with encouraging notes written on it, it would have ended up pinned to his fridge instead of collecting dust underneath his bed.

It took a lot of self-will not to link arms with Levi, and skip all the way through the grassy, flowery fields of exit gates and luggage pickup. At this rate of infatuation, Erwin would scoop Levi up into his arms and carry him through the threshold of their new, air-freshener scented hotel suite. And, god…. did that mean Erwin could have a honeymoon night too?

Instead, Erwin just settled for buying Levi a soda the size of a small dog, and giving him a little peck on the cheek, like a good, responsible boyfriend, and not a strange, horny and smitten creep who still struggled to apply the word “homosexual” to himself.

Oh, and while he tried not to be a horny creep, he might as well bring up the hotel situation. Something that had seemed like a smooth move by Erwin who booked the room two days ago seemed much more underhanded and ill-planned.

“So, uh, the hotel…. I booked it with only one bed. That isn’t a problem for you, right?” Erwin took a deep breath. “If it bothers you, I can sleep on the floor. I’m sure they’ll have an extra pull-out mattress or couch or something.”

* * *

 

Levi tried to control himself. It really wouldn’t do to go frothing at the mouth and spasming on the grimy floor of the airport terminal. One bed. One. Bed. Anyone who had ever seen any movie with college students in it knew what that meant.

The – dare he say it? – frickety fracking was imminent.

No. Levi scolded himself sternly as he watched the muscles in Erwin’s forearm rippling as he loaded their luggage into the trunk of a waiting taxi. He really would have to start showing some self restraint. He considered Erwin as much more than a quick fuck, and, had he really stepped back to evaluate himself and his priorities, Levi would have been quite alarmed at how horrifyingly virginal he had become. Petra would have slapped him sideways and asked him if he’d pulled some freaky Friday shit and switched bodies with his fifty year old mother. 

His dick hadn’t quite gotten the memo, though. It was currently twitching with interest in his jeans about the whole one-bed situation, but he managed to calm it somewhat as he preoccupied himself with climbing into the taxi and trying not to touch or even look at any of the questionable stains that dotted the plastic covering of the leather seats.

It was raining, and the icy needles spattered the smudgy windows and Levi’s collarbone where the glass didn’t quite come all the way up to the car’s hood, regardless of his efforts. The Space Needle rose out of the distance, jutting through the fog, but Levi was quite lost in admiring Erwin’s reflection in the glass behind him.

He had a feeling he would most definitely be uploading photographs of this spring break to a Facebook album promptly titled #blessed.

 


	23. Combustion

Eren stared at Jean, and Jean stared back at Eren.

“I have to tell you something,” Jean whispered, grabbing Eren’s hand tightly. They were in a dark cave with the noises of animated cartoon animals cackling at them from all sides, their log boat perched on the very precipice of what Jean was sure was certain extinction.

“Yes?” Eren whispered back, trying to ignore the way Jean’s fingers were all but digging trenches into his hand. “What is it?” If there was any time for Jean to declare his undying love, this would be it, but as it was, Eren was not so lucky.

“I’m deathly terrified of heights,” Jean admitted, and opened his mouth to say more, but the rest of his sentences were drowned out by his high-pitched shriek as the log slid down the watery track of the final drop on Splash Mountain.

*** 

Eren had to all but carry Jean off the ride, pushing him unceremoniously through the exit turnstiles while other college students, also on spring holiday, snickered behind their hands and took none too surreptitious photos to post on SnapChat or Instagram or any of the various other forms of social media.

“Do you mind if we buy the picture?” Eren asked, taking advantage of Jean’s current state of agreeableness; after all, Sir Jean Kirschtein the II, heir to the Kirschtein carpet cleaner empire, was feeling generous after his near brush with death, and he forked over the twenty dollars to buy Eren a copy of the picture gladly.

* * *

 

Although some of the nearly 90 degree angled streets gave Erwin a heart-attack, all-in-all he found their drive pleasant. The air smelled like sea-salt and little pine-tree air fresheners, and the hum of the engine mixed with the patter of gentle rain made him sleepy. Levi looked romantically waifish, staring out a window and framed by fog like a protagonist in a young-adult novel.

Would they fuck tonight?

Erwin had no idea. All the stars in the sky seemed to line up and tell them that, yes, tonight, beneath a cloudy Seattle night sky, in a four-star hotel bed, they would get laid. But how? What was Erwin supposed to do? He had to find an easy way to word, “Excuse me, but, I assume touching your dick will be a lot like touching my dick, but I don’t really know for sure- so tell me if I’m wrong. Also, I’ve been researching gay porn but frankly, I don’t think that’s how anal or sucking cock actually works, and you seem to be more familiar with the territory.”

A small bottle of lube, and a packet of condoms hid in Erwin’s suitcase, tucked away somewhere deep, and he wondered if he should have ‘accidentally’ left them behind, just so he had an excuse to put this off longer. God, he sounded so strange right now. He’d never treated sex like biting the bullet—and he desperately wanted to fuck around with Levi someday. 

And, oh god, he especially wanted it when he saw the rain hitting Levi’s collarbone. The skin looked damp, and slightly pink with the cold. Was that what Levi would look like during sex, with sweaty, flushed skin? Stressed, Erwin ran a hand through his hair and mumbled a few profanities. They continued to slip out, even when the taxi stopped and he began to unload luggage in front of the hotel. 

* * *

 

Levi frothed lightly as he watched the muscles in Erwin’s forearms rippling as the other student unloaded their luggage, slinging Levi’s duffel bag over his shoulder and waving off Levi’s attempts to help. It was definitely a boyfriend thing to do, something like what Levi might see in a romantic comedy or something of the sort. Erwin nudged him towards the revolving glass door of their hotel, and they spilled through on a gust of damp wind, dripping rain all over the tiled floors of the lobby.

Levi took a few moments to people watch while Erwin went up to the receptionist’s counter to check in with the reservations he’d made. Families moved in and out of the lobby, shaking out umbrellas for the rainy weather outside, and young couples giggled in the corners of the lobby, hand in hand, glued together inseparably, and it made Levi’s heart skip a beat as he imagined that he and Erwin probably looked that way to other people as well. 

A couple, huh? He thought to himself, even as he tugged his phone out of his back pocket and took a Snap of Erwin’s butt to send to Petra, and perhaps to save in his personal files for later. That was a part of Erwin’s anatomy that Levi would sorely like to be acquainted with, but perhaps the acquaintance would come sooner than later; Erwin had said he’d booked a single bed, after all. 

It was a good question to consider. Would they fuck tonight? Butterflies fluttered rapidly in Levi’s stomach as he thought about it as though he hadn’t thought, from the very first time he’d seen Erwin’s Tinder profile, about what that man’s dick could do to him.

God, Levi scolded himself as he watched Erwin heading back to him, his eyes riveted on the not so inconspicuous bulge in Erwin’s jeans. He was acting like the nervous virgin again, and he frantically worried about the strip of condoms and tiny travel sized packets of lube he’d stashed away in the bottom of his duffel bag. Perhaps he had been far too forward about the whole thing, and he stood up on tiptoe to peck Erwin fondly on the cheek, still amazed that he had the audacity to do even that. 

Perhaps the frickety frack would wait for another time. Levi Jr. (and Petra) would be sorely disappointed, but Erwin occupied far too special a place in Levi’s heart to soil the affection with the hedonistic spoils of war. Levi might or might not have re-nicknamed Erwin’s still-hidden dick Alexander the Great.

* * *

 

The way Levi’s eyes kept digging into him made Erwin feel like a celebrity: glamorous and desirable. He puffed out his chest and swung luggage around, in some sort of wild human version of a Bird of Paradise mating dance. He didn’t miss the camera pointed at his ass either, and had, in fact, flexed his meaty buns into a beautiful, tight package for Levi to attempt to capture with meager pixels.

Erwin wondered if perhaps, just maybe , Levi would react positively to other pictures of other parts of Erwin’s anatomy. He glanced down at the bulge in his pants, and marveled at the potential within. He’d never actually sent anyone a dick pic before, save for one during an awkward sexting exchange with Marie during a trip. 

It wouldn’t scare off Levi if he did, would it? He found it hard to believe that someone who stealthily snapped ass photos would break up with him over his phone’s 8 megapixel camera’s interpretation of his 8 inches (when erect). All of the glances Levi spared him, and all of the little hand brushes and pecks on the cheek only made Erwin more confident in his idea. 

When he thought about it though, hadn’t Levi shot him all of those sultry little looks before they kissed? Erwin’s mind raced back, through Tupperware containers of soup, to tutoring, and finally—the aesthetic of cinnamon dolce latte spilled across a cream sweater.

“Oh my God,” Erwin stammered, in the hotel elevator. “How long have you liked me?”

* * *

 

Levi nearly had a conniption at the question. “Wh-what?” he managed, weakly, grinning up at Erwin and trying not to ignore the painful grimace that he could see reflected out of the corner of his eye, reflected a thousand times in the reflective glass walls of the elevator. Smooth, Levi, real smooth, he could all but hear Petra chirping at him, and he hoped fervently that she was having a spring break much devoid of awkward exchanges.

No. If the look Erwin was giving him was any indication, Levi already knew that Erwin knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he’d picked up on Levi’s low key (well, what he’d thought had been low key) infatuation with him, and, frankly, Levi was horrified. Also, a bit surprised that Erwin hadn’t picked up on it sooner. Petra had informed him that he had the subtlety of a speeding train with all its bells and whistles going, and Levi had rolled his eyes dramatically before launching into an in depth critical analysis of the text conversation that had transpired between Erwin and himself in the past ten minutes.

He remembered that exchange well. Erwin had sent 1 message. Levi had sent 16, and Petra had cried from sheer laughter.

“Umm…” He stared at the plush carpet in the elevator, wondering if it was thick enough to possibly rise up and swallow him whole. If he was going to be honest, the correct answer would be: “probably since the first time I saw your Tinder profile.” But no, that would have been far too clingy, and would detract from the calm, collected, somewhat aloof personality he was had been trying (and failing) to build for himself ever since he’d seen his first Panic! At the Disco music video back in grade ten. 

“For a few weeks?” His voice lilted up at the end, and it was an utterly blatant lie, but it really would not do to lay out all his cards on the table this early in the relationship. Perhaps it was something that Levi would come forth with more at a later date.

* * *

 

Erwin took Levi’s hand to lead him out of the elevator. Either zooming up several stories had made him dizzy, or the revelation had. Either way, he stumbled for a moment, before giggling stupidly and running a nervous hand through his hair.

“No, no,” he reassured Levi, noticing his mortified look. “I think it’s cute. Really. It’s flattering.” For good measure, Erwin planted a smooch onto the top of his head, because he really didn’t want Levi to associate any memories of him with humiliation.

God, he couldn’t even believe that Levi had liked him for so long. He must have accomplished some incredible deed in a past life, because Erwin of Now and Today did not bear many qualifications for boyfriend material. He had money, a pretty body, and…. self-esteem? Yikes. Not with a list that short.

Yep. That was it. Attractive qualities exhausted. This meant that if he wanted to keep Levi, he’d have to seriously work what he had, at least, until he could develop a few more positive traits. Maybe some of Levi would rub off on him? With someone who had assembled their life as neatly together as Levi had, maybe Erwin could get some of that to rub off on him. 

* * *

 

In the span of two and a half seconds, Levi seemed to have developed debilitating tinnitus. His ears were ringing something fierce, and he barely heard the ping of the elevator door as it slid open to disgorge them on the seventeenth floor, the cool clinical voice of the announcer saying that the carriage was going down again.

He ambled down the corridor behind Erwin, who was still toting all their luggage like a rather blonde, rather gorgeous pack mule that Levi wouldn’t mind taking a ride on every now and then. He grinned, deliriously, lecherously, at the site of Erwin’s backside as his mind lingered on the kiss Erwin had pressed into the part of his hair not two minutes prior. 

Certainly that was endearing, and certainly Erwin thought none the less of him for his infatuation. But what if he was just being kind? Levi thought to himself in a moment of panic, and nearly collided into Erwin as the latter stopped abruptly in front of a door labeled 1702 and swiped the key card the receptionists in the lobby had given him in a neat little envelope.

The door swung open on its well-oiled hinges with a soft whisper, gliding over thick carpet that Levi could feel even through the thick rubber soles of his shoes. The room was of a decent size, with the curtains over the glass sliding doors to their balcony pulled to the sides to showcase a lovely view of the Space Needle, but Levi’s eyes were drawn, magnetized, to the bed. The very large, very single king bed that dominated the middle of the room. 

History would be made here tonight, he was fairly sure, and he swallowed down the sudden lump of nervousness that had materialized in his throat, turning to bare all his teeth at Erwin in what he hoped was a grateful smile.

* * *

 

The hotel and their room, for the most part, didn’t strike Erwin as anything out of the ordinary. But, one thing stood out, and it rested in the center of the room, imposing and ominous. The King-Sized Bed, as large as it was singular. Once upon a time, Erwin had booked the room with glee and anticipation, but now he came toppling from his high and mighty throne, to break his back on pre-sex nervousness. 

“Tutor me,” he whispered to himself, horrified, and praying that Levi, a certified homosexual, could show him the way.

Erwin’s dick, however, knew no fear, and it crouched and twitched between his legs, ready to leap up at a moment’s notice. Every passing moment with Levi threated to send him into full mast- every little bum wiggle, or vocal noise that could be interpreted as a sexual moan ruined him. And… fuck. If things stayed that way, then he’d go off like a can of whipped cream as soon as Levi so much as brushed against his dick. 

He’d have to… fix himself before that. Erwin glanced at the bathroom door. “I……. gotta go take a piss,” he excused himself, before sidestepping away from Levi. In the long run, masturbating quickly and quietly in the bathroom would help both of them out. He had a killer refractory period anyway.

* * *

His name was Auruo Bossard, and if Levi had still been around the campus for the spring holiday, he would have convinced Petra to leave it at a one night stand. As it turned out, Levi was not here, he was off cavorting in Seattle and probably having loads of amazing sex, if the absence of his regular twenty-four SnapChats a day was any indication.

For Petra and Auruo, a one night stand had quickly turned into a two night stand, which had turned into a three-night stand and brunch the next morning.

If one were to ask Petra if she possibly had a crush, she would snort and just say that Auruo had an amazing snack cabinet fit for raiding.

It was true. He’d sprung for Nong Shim Spicy Chicken Instant Noodles ($1.29 a bowl) as opposed to Maruchan (25 cents a packet). Petra had all but wept in joy.


	24. Crackle

Levi stared at the closed bathroom door in abject despair. Just when things had been going so well, too! He had had no doubt Erwin had been nothing short of charmed by his advances, but if the way he had charged into the bathroom, his pallor quite reminiscent of a yogurt on the brink of expiring, was any indication, Levi was quite sure that, somewhere along the line, he’d fucked up.

He whipped out his phone to text Petra for advice. Surely she would know what to do. 

As he was waiting for Petra to text him back – the girl and her phone were about as inseparable as Levi hoped he would one day be with Russell – he heard Erwin groaning, the noises muffled by the wood but audible nonetheless. He frowned to himself as he marched across the suite to press his ear up against the bathroom door to investigate. 

Erwin sounded rather pained. That certainly wasn’t normal. Levi considered his options; perhaps Erwin had gotten a bad bag of honey roasted peanuts on the flight and was now suffering the consequences. If that was the case, Levi thought to himself as he sank to a sitting position against the door, perhaps history would be put on pause for a while. That was just as well, what was a few more weeks or a few more months of abject thirst? Though, admittedly he couldn’t help but feel a tiny bit disappointed. 

His phone vibrated in his hand, and he swiped open the text. 

Petra (just now): ‘he’s probably jacking off’ 

He frowned at the phone screen. No, surely not. If anything, Petra was even thirstier than he was! He hadn’t entertained that idea at all, Erwin was far too prim and proper for those sorts of shenanigans, and his fingers were a blur over the keyboard as he reprimanded his best friend for even planting the thought in his mind. His cock twitched with interest in his pants, and his glares at the crotch of his jeans were doing nothing to subdue it.

* * *

 

Shiny porcelain tiles and lemon-scented air freshener didn't exactly match up with any of Erwin's fantasies, but despite the setting, it took him no time and only a few gentle, teasing strokes to wind up with his dick, completely hard in his hand. Erwin groaned, quietly but obscenely, before jumping when he heard something against the door.

Supposedly, he'd booked a soundproof room, but Levi must be able to hear him beyond the bathroom. Mortified, Erwin shoved apart of his hand into his mouth and bit down, as if that could quiet him completely. The embarrassment of getting caught (because what else could Levi think was making him moan like that?) should have killed the mood, but Erwin started to feel like an exhibitionist.

After all, Levi, who secretly photographed Erwin's ass, couldn't be too put off. Maybe this was just a natural step in their relationship? Maybe Erwin could show him a photo of something new? He'd never been one to share surprise dick pics, but if his life was a mess and he wasn't ready to offer up his heart, at least he could offer up his eight-inches to Levi. 

Flustered, Erwin pulled out his phone and fumbled with the interface. A few swipes across his screen had his camera app pulled up, and a few more swipes across his dick had it completely hard and raring to go again. Erwin framed his picture, moving his phone around in one hand, and took the photo. 

It took a few shots for Erwin to wind up with something to his satisfaction. On his phone screen, his penis shone in all of its horny glory. Dark gold pubic hair glinted underneath the bathroom lights, and the head of his penis shimmered with a tasteful touch of precum. His hand wrapped suggestively around the base for size reference. 

Erwin pressed send. 

It took two seconds for him to regret his action. Oh God. Oh fuck. What if Levi didn't want to see? It was too late for him to delete! Erwin had to think of something, and with all of his college educated genius, came up with the perfect plan. 

" haha, whoops, wrong photo " Erwin texted Levi, followed by a parade of blushing emotes. He prayed that Levi wouldn't recognize the tile in the bathroom later, and he dreaded whatever response Levi would send. Putting off the inevitable (and still wanting to get off despite everything) Erwin stepped into the shower and tried to forget "erwin_jr.jpg" in favor of imagining Levi's lips around his dick.

* * *

 

Levi didn’t know what hit him. He tapped on the message Erwin had just sent, fully expecting it to be something asking him to please run to a pharmacy and buy antacids or laxatives or something, and he was about to be flattered by the deep trust Erwin put in him in entrusting him with such a vital task, but he certainly hadn’t been expecting this. 

Erwin’s dick peeped up at him in all its glory, and his mouth watered at the sight. That would also, perhaps, explain the noises Levi had heard earlier, ones that were vaguely masked by the spray of the shower inside. 

Did he find it awe inspiring? Yes.

Was its length and girth acceptable? More than adequate. He’d have to stretch himself out before the main event, it looked to be rather sizable.

Did Levi want it inside him? God, yes.

Petra’s texts were pouring in, telling him off for thinking that Erwin was anything other than the twenty year old male that he so clearly was. Levi set his phone to mute, swiped away the notifications, and tapped on the photograph so that it filled his entire screen. Slumping against the bathroom door, he unzipped his jeans and tugged his cock out, now fully invested in the situation at hand. In hand, if Levi wanted to be accurate.

He was three strokes in, imagining what havoc Erwin’s cock could wreak on his insides, when his mind flashed back to the text right underneath. 

Wrong picture, Erwin had said. Levi frowned as his hips slowed their incessant thrusting into the curve of his hand. What photo had Erwin been trying to send to him, then? He wondered vaguely, rubbing his thumb absentmindedly over the weeping head of his cock. What could have been so pressing that he felt the need to send it from the bathroom? For that matter, why did Erwin have a dick pic saved in his phone that he could quickly pull up for reference? Did he send it out to many people?

No, his better half warned him cautiously. Perhaps Erwin had a dick pic for some medical reason, and he had to be hard for the same reason. Maybe there was a troublesome mole that only peeped out when he rolled his foreskin back from the head like he was doing in this photograph.

Despite his flawless logic, jealousy flared heavy in him, and he began to jerk himself off with a vigor fueled by envy. Whoever his unseen competition was, he was sure that none were quite as sexually adventurous as he, Levi Ackerman, fanfiction connoisseur extraordinaire, was, and he was sure that no one else would be able to match Erwin in a battle of wits. Or a battle of the bulge, if one would, he thought to himself as he took another glance at Erwin’s cock and let his head fall back against the bathroom door with a thud.

He grinned savagely to himself as he thrust into the tight circle of his fist, hardly trying to keep his war cries (see: whimpers, yelps, sobs) at bay.

* * *

 

The shower started with a hiss and the hot water hit Erwin in pleasant patters, rolling down his skin. He looked down at his body, down to his cock, swollen and proud between his thighs (almost as if Erwin hadn’t just humiliated himself by sending a picture of it) and at the rest of himself- lines of water streaming through toned-muscles and lines of tendon. At least he had something going on for him.

Levi would look devastatingly handsome if he got soaked. Erwin could picture it easily- beautiful bedroom eyes with droplets clinging to lashes, and soaked black bangs dripping water down Levi’s face. It’d be like some kind of glorious emo stock photo.

And, oh fuck, Levi’s lips…. His lips, elegant, pink and wet, wrapped around Erwin’s dick. There it was! The fantasy to fuel him all the way to orgasm!

Erwin’s hands weren’t as soft as he imagined Levi’s lips were, but they did the trick. The water made a pleasant suction as he slid his fingers around his dick, and Erwin grunted.

A thud echoed through the bathroom, and Erwin gave his fist a startled thrust, before peeking through the shower curtains. Was that Levi, thumping at the door like an angry neighbor and telling him off for his crudeness? Erwin stared at the door, in abject horror, until he began to hear other noises. 

At first, he thought it must have been a wistful imagination… but no. Beyond the confines of the bathroom, that was definitely Levi whimpering and moaning. Some kind of weird mixture of relief and arousal hit Erwin, and he stroked himself, encouraged by… mutual masturbation?

That could be Levi whimpering around his dick, couldn’t it? Erwin closed his eyes, bit his lip, and used his free arm to support himself against the wall. Would Levi touch himself as he blew Erwin? Would he let Erwin tug on his hair, holding on for dear life as Levi sucked the living daylights out of him? Levi must be really, really good at blowjobs. Erwin’s imagination told him so, anyway. 

A particularly enthusiastic cry of passion pierced past the walls, and Erwin, a whopping two and a half minutes into enthusiastically beating his meat, came hard with an accompanying shout. He panted and watched the water wash away his cum; a benefit to sinning in the shower.

When all was said and done, he turned off the water, wrapped his waist in a towel, and wondered how he’d ever manage to find enough courage and step back into the hotel room to face Levi. It'd be impossible after the rollercoaster of up-and-down boners he just went through.

* * *

 

Levi whined to himself, not even attempting to bite back a choked sob as he stroked himself to orgasm, spilling silver threads of come over his palm and over the soft planes of his belly from where he’d rucked his shirt up to tweak his nipples into rosy buds, pinching and twisting and rubbing. 

Erwin shouted inside, some garbled mess that Levi couldn’t make out over the thudding of his heartbeat in his ears in combination with the shower spray, and Levi tried to calm himself down, slumping woozy against the mahogany door with a giddy, loose grin on his face. 

A few seconds later, he scrambled to his knees, his jeans still gaping open and his dick flopping softly against his thigh. Oh, God, oh God, oh God, he thought frantically to himself. The shower was starting to taper off, and Erwin was probably wrapping a towel around his waist right now in preparation to head out to the bedroom. The very thought of Erwin clad in nothing but a towel knotted loosely around his waist, water dripping from the ends of his hair and tracing down his gloriously chiseled body, was almost enough to make Levi harden again. No. Bad Levi, Jr! he scolded himself, frowning down sternly at his cock, which quivered under his intense scrutiny. 

He couldn’t be caught red-handed, this certainly would not do! Levi scrabbled for the packet of wet wipes that rested innocuously on the hotel provided tea service on the wet bar, ripping it open frantically and swiping at his palms, at his abdomen. He promptly discarded the evidence into the tiny metal trash can beneath the bar, groaning with dismay as he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirrored backing. His face was flushed, his hair sticking up in dark cowlicks, and his eyes suspiciously bright. 

He took a few deep breaths to try and steady himself, flitting over to the other side of the room and tucking himself back into his pants and boxers as he leaned against the glass of the balcony door, watching the rain trickle down outside. The cool glass was comforting against his cheeks, and he hoped his blush would be gone by the time Erwin walked out.

* * *

 

When Erwin exited the bathroom, steam swelled out around him in heavenly clouds. A goddamned choir of angels might as well have accompanied his appearance; the glisten of his muscles and the white towel, temptingly draped around his hips made for an angelic feature. 

Levi, on the other hand, looked sinful on the ground with orgasm-pink cheeks. His hair scattered across his face in a much messier way than Erwin remembered it, which prompted him to reach down and ruffle it more.

In retrospect, petting Levi like a dog must have been a strange reaction to catching him right after a very good time, but Erwin supposed positive reinforcement wasn’t a bad choice either. Ah, yes, good boy. Have a good, long think about Erwin and masturbate more often! 

Fuck, Levi really had been…. thinking about Erwin, hadn’t he? Had the picture really prompted that? Pride, lust, and humiliation all blended up inside of him, leaving him momentarily dazed. He picked up the pieces of his mental state quickly, however, and pointed toward the covers. 

“I, uh… It’s time for bed, isn’t it?” he asked Levi, refusing to address the implications of Levi whipping out his willie at the sight of Erwin’s impulsively-sent photographs. That was a problem for future Erwin.

He continued, “I’ll just… slip on a pair of boxers or something, and order takeout or something? I’m starving. I haven’t had a bite to eat for a long time.”

* * *

 

Had Levi not just come, and rather violently at that, he had no doubt that Little Levi would be raring to go, champing at the bit, and all other number of horse metaphors, at the thought of Erwin possibly dropping the towel and giving Levi a glimpse of what he was sure was a positively luscious ass. 

As it was, he stood up dazedly to fall limply onto the bed, watching with bleary eyes from the pillow as Erwin dipped behind the closet door, presumably to put on some clothes, much to Levi’s regret. 

“Do you think we could get room service?” he asked, all too aware of how slurred his words were. This was even better than being drunk, he thought to himself. He’d have to tell Petra. His iPhone was digging into his thigh at the angle he’d sprawled across the bed at, but he didn’t dare risk reaching into his pocket for it. He was quite sure that phallic picture Erwin had sent him would pop up right as he unlocked the phone, and he was far too tired to risk another boner. No, that was passing into dangerous territory, and Levi simply would not risk popping one in front of Erwin. Erwin was too pure and precious for that.

“If not, take-out sounds good, too,” he mumbled into the pillow, halfway asleep already. He toed off his shoes absentmindedly, and they plopped to the floor with two soft thuds. “I think I might take a nap, if that’s cool.” 

Before Erwin could reply, Levi had already dozed off.


	25. Incandescence

Levi was this short of screaming. He had woken up two or so hours later to find Erwin snoring in fits and starts next to him, and he was the picture of absolutely every domestic fantasy Levi had ever had. Gosh, he thought to himself uneasily as he watched Erwin snuffle in his sleep, his Adam’s apple bobbing and mumbling something about some economics class he had taken, but this was getting dangerously close to infatuation. He was, as Petra had pointed out weeks and weeks ago, horrifyingly obsessed, and with a tingle of fondness blooming in the pit of his belly at the way Erwin scratched absentmindedly at his belly – oh, God, he was wearing a pair of boxers that were riding dangerously low on his hips – Levi thought that might actually well and truly be in love.

It was quite a bad position to be in, if he was intent on still playing the field while he could, but perhaps Erwin was his lucky strike. His pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Erwin woke himself up with a particularly loud snore that Levi could feel rumbling into his bones. What a guy.

Erwin smacked his lips for a few seconds, blinking blearily around in the dark gloom of the evening before peering at Levi and starting in surprise, as though shocked to see him curled up in bed next to him.

“Well, hello, sleeping beauty,” Levi quipped smoothly, surprised by his own audacity. “You’re awake, then.”

“I am,” Erwin grunted, rubbing a hand over his face and scrubbing the sleep out of his eyes. Levi’s stomach growled in protest, demanding attention. “Oh, shoot. We’d better get some food into you.”

“We’d better,” Levi agreed, hopping up and turning to unzip his duffel so Erwin wouldn’t see his burning face. It wouldn’t do to give anything away, just yet, not until he was sure Erwin…well, like liked him back. He stifled the violent urge to turn back as he heard the sheets rustling, Erwin’s joints popping as he stood up and stretched, the zip of jeans and the ruffling of a cotton T-shirt that looked as though it had gone several times through the wash and was now deliciously soft. After their little…mutual ‘tryst’ in and out of the bathroom, Levi’s mind had gone straight to their perfect life in a suburban marriage, with no less than three cats. Maybe a minivan. With car seats…for their three cats. The concept of actual children was foreign, and, frankly, terrifying to consider, and Levi shoved it away frantically from his mind as he followed Erwin out the door, collecting one of the hotel’s free disposable umbrellas and stepping out into the misty rain.

* * *

 

Erwin scrutinized Levi carefully as Levi bit daintily into a French fry at a small hole in the wall diner they’d discovered only a block or so away from the hotel. It had an excellent view of the Space Needle, or would have had, had the fog not been rolling in heavy from the sea. If he was being well and truly honest with himself, he was still rather unsure about where things with Levi stood at the current moment.

Did he like him? Yes. Very much.

Did he like like him? Well, that was venturing into previously uncharted territory that Erwin didn’t much want to consider at the moment. They were only twenty, and certainly there were other things to preoccupy their minds instead of the desire to perhaps settle down and grow old together. Mike would have laughed at him, teasing him about growing sentimental ever since he’d hit his second decade of life.

Well, perhaps those maudlin ideas would dissipate once they were on the cruise and he could be distracted by more mundane and visceral things, like how Levi might look without his shirt, with tanning oil slicked all over him, and –

Erwin took a hasty sip of water, spilling half of the icy contents down the front of his jacket. No, not in public, he reminded himself sternly, blissfully unaware of Levi’s fawning stare.

* * *

 

Levi, for his part, was utterly charmed. Was Erwin marriage material? Oh yes, three thousand percent.

* * *

 

Levi couldn’t help but toss and turn that night in bed, all too aware of Erwin’s long limbs tucked neatly beside him under the sheets. He was utterly self-conscious, having hopped beneath the covers quickly after returning from the bathroom, where he’d frantically brushed his teeth and texted Petra the latest developments in the relationship. She hadn’t texted back (the bitch, Levi grumbled to himself, knowing full well that Petra had much better things to be doing over spring break than listening to his ongoing list of laments), and Levi had been left to face the proverbial beast himself.

Said beast was already falling asleep by the time Levi got back and wriggled under the blankets, and he tried fervently not to twitch too much, stiffening fully as Erwin rolled over in his sleep and wrapped an arm around him, burrowing his nose into Levi’s hair. Oh, God. He hadn’t prepared for this. Quick! Think! He commanded himself sternly. What was one supposed to do in such a situation?

  1. Run screaming for the hills
  2. Accept the blessings that had been spontaneously bestowed upon him
  3. Try desperately to not pop a boner



Levi settled for B, though he vacillated between B and C for several long moments. It was a well-known fact that, when in doubt, B was the most commonly picked answer, and it was an option that he hadn’t chosen in quite a while. So there was that.

He managed to doze off sometime around three-thirty, cuddling back into the warmth and the steadiness of Erwin’s deep breathing, and he was woken up at precisely eight, his eyes still glued shut and gummy with sleep, Erwin’s promises that he could sleep all he wanted on the cruise ship but they had to leave now if they wanted to make it to boarding on time.

“Alright, alright,” he mumbled, and he allowed Erwin to maneuver him into the bathroom and bundle him into a coat before herding him outside. He squinted against the bright glare of the cheery morning sunlight, and clutched at his duffel bag tighter as he followed Erwin’s lead to what was sure would be the next step in the YA Coming of Age novel he appeared to have become the main protagonist of. He certainly hoped Petra, as his supporting character, was developing a lovely backstory of her own.

* * *

 

Jean vowed never to come back to Disneyland. Not for his birthday, not for Christmas, not to celebrate the downfall of some major corporation. Sure, Eren was utterly fascinated by anything and everything, but Jean had been viciously reminded in the ticket queue of how much he hated the place.

It was expensive, and there were children. Everywhere. They offended Jean’s delicate sensibilities, and he grimaced with despair as he stepped into a puddle of what he sincerely hoped was chunky ice cream and not something more unsavory.

Eren was oblivious to Jean’s distress, and dragged him into line at the nearest ride.

Teacups. Of course. Jean wanted to cry.


	26. Afire

The cruise went well. Frighteningly well. It had been precisely one week of giddy debauchery and bright, sparkling, calm blue water. Levi had gotten a tan, and Erwin had, quite admirably, fended off his urges to join the elderly folk in playing shuffleboard on the second deck. They had gorged themselves at the buffets, and with some poorly doctored IDs that Erwin had secured for the both of them by blackmailing some other poor sap in the business school, the week passed nicely in a drunken haze. 

Well. Not quite so drunken. Erwin was still hedging around what had happened on day 4 of his and Levi's Grand Adventure. Tensions were running high. The buffet was closed for the day. They were hideously sober, there were no pearly dolphins leaping outside the porthole, and they had just left Oahu behind. The single cabin Erwin had booked for them had been smaller than he'd expected, and the bed smaller than that, still. 

It was truly a miracle that Levi hadn't kicked him out to sleep on the floor in disgrace. Little Erwin had been particularly excitable over the past week. In Erwin's defense, they were two strapping young men, in the primes of their lives, trapped in what might very well be starting to morph into full-blown affection. 

He still hesitated to say the word, even on the private blog he kept for himself locked away in folder in folder in folder on his laptop. Levi's head was pillowed on his thigh, and the other sophomore was mumbling something about coffee-stained sweaters in his sleep. In contrast to the bed they'd shared on the ship, Erwin's studio was downright spacious, and Levi had wasted no time in colonizing the empty spaces with his own belongings. everywhere Erwin looked reminded him of Levi, now, from the multitude of shampoos multiplying every day in the shower caddy to Levi's neatly pressed and ironed dress shirts and sweater vests hanging in the closet. The entire transformation had taken him a little less than a month, just in time for finals, and Jean had gladly taken his small bedroom in his previous apartment. Something under the guise of wanting to move out from his cockroach-infested freshman housing, but, cockroaches or no, Levi had informed Erwin in no uncertain terms that Jean was just angling to get a bedroom closer to Eren. 

But enough. Erwin was skirting around the point, even to his own private journal. 

"Dear Journal," he wrote, his fingers stilling over the keys as he hesitated, before reaching over to his desk and taking a huge gulp of liquid courage. The Fireball whiskey burned down his throat as it went down, wriggling heat into his esophagus and belly, and erwin took a deep breath and went for it. 

"Dear Journal, I think I may be in love."

* * *

 

Contrary to Erwin's private beliefs, Levi was hyperaware of every agonizing moment that erwin spent wrapped around him, spooning his back while his dick was, in its own admirable way, trying to spoon him as well. He swore it was like a brand burning its way into the backs of his boxers, and his fingers itched to reach over for his phone, charging on the nightstand, and text Petra eagerly about it. He'd even use data, to ensure that his message got through. It was that important. 

But that would have given away his assumed position of relative unawareness, and Levi had just finished reading The Art of War for the 31st time, and he knew that knowing one's enemy - or, as he hoped, his very best friend in roughly 0.301 seconds - was vital. 

"Erwin," he breathed, and Erwin stiffened behind him. 

"Levi?" he asked, half fearfully, half sultrily. Was sultrily a word? Levi would have to check on Word's spellcheck tool later. (It was.) "Am I bothering you?" 

Levi had to forcefully suppress a squeal of delight. Erwin? Bothering him? No, far from it. 

"No, not at all," he said, once he'd gotten himself under some semblance of control. "You're being kind of poky, though." He wriggled back slightly to emphasize his point. 

Erwin gasped as though scandalized, as though he'd never been accused of such an act. Levi was half expecting him to break out a terrible accent, say something like, "Lawdy, my stars!" or something. Of course, Erwin did nothing of the sort. 

"Sorry, sorry," he stumbled instead, and Levi could feel him starting to wriggle back towards the two cubic inches of free space left on the other end of the bed. He reached behind him to grab at Erwin's wrist. ended up with a generous handful of his cock, barely swaddled in the cotton boxers that held it. Ah well. The time for subtlety had come and gone somewhere between Levi's third Mai Tai and the face full of geriatric thigh he'd received on Day 3 of the cruise. 

"Don't be," Levi insisted, hardly breathing, almost unable to believe his own daring. My, but he was saucy! "You want to. I want to."

"Want to?" Erwin's voice sounded tortured. Levi petted him through the cloth, grinning at the stifled gasp Erwin couldn't help but contain. "Want to what?"

"Oh, you know," Levi whispered, trying valiantly to ignore the rhythmic thumping from the other side of the wall, which he'd just recently deduced was the frantic couplings of the fiftieth-honeymoon folks. "A thing or two." 

"A thing or two," Erwin muttered, but he was already coming closer, his breath puffing hot across Levi's neck, and Levi grinned triumphantly as Erwin laid a tentative kiss across his shoulder blade. 

"A thing or two," he affirmed, rolling over on top of Erwin and reaching for the nightstand drawer on Erwin's side of the bed, where he'd had the foresight to stash a bottle of lube he'd (ashamedly) begged from one of said honeymooners, who'd stuffed it into his hands with a knowing wink. His fingers scrabbled across the wooden tabletop, coming upon the fan's remote, and he clicked it on, letting blessedly cool air flood through the heated room as he struggled out of the confines of his tank top. "Come on. I'll tutor you." 

"T-tutor me?!" Erwin gasped, sounding shocked beyond his wits, but his hands had found their ways to Levi's hips even in the dark, and even now, his fingertips were playing with the elastic waistband. 

"Sure, it's not that hard," Levi said, grinning dizzily as he popped open the bottle and slicked his fingers up with oil that smelled horrifyingly reminiscent of Ben-Gay and a Chinese pharmacy. Beggars couldn't be choosers, though, and he wriggled out of his boxers quickly, lifting one leg and then the other to allow Erwin to tug them off him. "You've done similar things before, I'm sure. You're no stranger to the concept."

* * *

 

Erwin's fingers flew over the keyboard, the screen blurring gently beneath his eyes and the generous application of Fireball Whiskey, but he was determined to see it through. The taste of cinnamon lingered heavily in his mouth, burning his lips slightly. Levi had started to snore, a cute little sort of snuffling sound that Erwin adored beyond measure. His phone dinged on Erwin's desk, a text message flashing across the screen, and Levi stirred a bit but didn't wake. 

"It was an exhilarating experience. I've never done anything quite like it. We fucked." 

Erwin frowned at the blinking cursor, erased it. 

"We had sex." Better, though still crass. He took another sip of whiskey, continued.

* * *

 

The room was dark, but Erwin was sure Levi could see how bright red his face was in the relative darkness of the room. The fan was billowing gusts of cool air into the room now that Levi had switched it on, but it wasn't doing much for the sorry state of Erwin's blush. He could hear sounds, a slick sort of squishing sound a bit like macaroni and cheese, and he'd probably never be able to eat macaroni and cheese again, which was a shame, because he'd practically lived off Easy Mac for the better half of a semester, but Levi's breaths were coming in huffs and puffs and little whines that Erwin swore he could still hear ringing in his ears if he listened very carefully. 

"Fuck," Levi hissed, one hand splayed out across Erwin's chest, the other arm bent behind him and casting eerie shadow puppets across the wall. "Fuck."

"Are you okay?" Erwin asked, gaping up at him. He couldn't make out Levi's features in the light, could just barely see the shine in his hair. "Is there anything I can do?" 

"I'm fine," Levi grunted back, a high-pitched whine slipping out between his syllables. Erwin felt a jolt of pleasure arrow its way down to the pit of his belly. He tried desperately to convince himself that it was because he was hungry. Failed miserably. He was, horrifyingly, desperately turned on, with a capital T, as Mike might have observed, and Mike was nothing if not a master of the craft. 

A moment later, the little bottle, along with a shiny foil packet, caught him right in the throat, making him cough as he reached up to grasp at it. Levi laughed, a sort of breathy choked off thing, and instructed him to get himself ready. Surely he could do that by himself, couldn't he? 

Erwin agreed that he could; after all, he was almost halfway through a bachelor's. 

His slicked fingers allowed for a few clumsy, if generous strokes over the rubbery latex, wriggling his way out of his boxers and tossing them unceremoniously over the side of the bed, before Levi shoved his hands equally as unceremoniously out of the way. 

The fan whirred. The headboard in the cabin adjacent to them banged roughly against the wall. Levi huffed as he lowered himself tantalizing inch by inch down Little Erwin, who could have wept with joy, and was, in fact, in imminent danger of doing exactly that. Erwin, to this day, had no idea how he'd managed such iron control. 

Levi settled in his lap with a final gasp, his slippery hands splayed over Erwin's stomach. "Jesus Christ," he said, once he'd gotten his breath, a laugh injecting its way into his tone. "You don't fuck around, do you?" 

Erwin wasn't sure if this was a compliment. The couple on the other side of the wall screamed. Perhaps they were congratulating the two of them. 

Levi swiveled his hips, testing the feel of it, and Erwin barely had time to get out a gasp of Levi's name before Levi was rocking forward and squeezing around him in some motion that Erwin was quite sure was witchcraft. His breathy sighs and exhalations infected Erwin with the apparent pleasure Levi was feeling, and, dizzy and half-blinded by the darkness, he fumbled in the general direction of Levi's thighs. His hand slid clumsily over the jut of Levi's cock, and if the muffled shout Levi let out was anything to go by, he was more than glad to be the recipient of Erwin's attentions. 

Erwin put his all into it, thumbing at the head and twisting his wrist a bit as he got closer to the base, like he would have done for himself, and was proud of what an astute student he was as, not even five minutes later of this clumsy thrust and stroke later, Levi screamed, almost ear shatteringly loud, and spattered come over the front of Erwin's tank top. Erwin could have sworn the couple next door applauded, but he was far too busy coming himself to think too hard about it.

* * *

 

"What are you writing?" Levi asked, his words jolting Erwin out of his half drunken stupor. He jumped, tried desperately to click to another application on his laptop, but Levi was having none of it, and he rolled over in Erwin's bed to frown at the screen. "You keep a diary?" Levi asked, confused, and Erwin was still sober enough to appreciate the fact that Levi wasn't jeering at him. Levi sniffed. "And you're drunk?" 

"Not that drunk," Erwin protested, but his words were slightly slurred, if the frown on Levi's face was anything to go by. "I wash jusht reminding myshelf of that fateful day."

"Ah, that fateful day." Levi's eyes quickly scanned the screen, finding it acceptable. He patted Erwin's thigh proprietarily. "Not half-bad, if you want to go into erotica someday." He shot Erwin a teasing look. "I could supply you with new material anytime."

Erwin flushed a bright red, and buried his face into the pillow. Levi rolled himself neatly off the bed, yawning, stretching, and Erwin peeped out from the pillowcase just in time to see a slice of still-golden skin between the hem of Levi's loose shirt and his boxers. Little Erwin twitched with interest, but, as though sensing this, Levi turned to roll his eyes at him. 

"You have a final at eight, and you're writing this drivel," he said, not unkindly. "Go to sleep." 

"Alright," Erwin conceded, good-naturedly. His parents would love Levi, when they met him at the end of the school year, he was sure. He was exactly the right influence his mother had hoped he would meet at UTrost, and certainly they would be able to come to terms with the whole state of affairs. College was a time for self-discovery, after all, and Erwin had been doing quite a bit of self-discovering.

* * *

 

Levi scooped up his phone from the desk as he wandered into the little kitchenette to pour himself a glass of water. 

Petra had texted him, asking him the reason behind the cryptic messages he'd left her earlier that day and which she'd only just gotten around to reading. It had been Happy Hour at the campus establishment, and Auruo, who was apparently quite adept at making genuine looking fake ID cards, had treated her to unlimited appetizers and bottomless frozen watermelon margaritas. He seemed to be quite a good chap, and Levi approved of him heartily. Anything with free food was a good steal. 

"Well," he texted back, his fingers flying across the touch screen as Erwin's chainsaw snores began to drift from the bedroom, "i think i might be in love." Heart eyes emoji. 

A grey bubble appeared almost instantly at the bottom of the screen, but Levi silenced his phone and clicked it off as he rinsed the glass and placed it back in the cupboard before heading off to sleep. It could wait, and he was sure, with a 95% confidence interval, that his feelings would still be the same in the morning. 


End file.
